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University of California • Berkeley

Regional Oral History Office University of California

The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California

University History Series
Department of History at Berkeley

Carl E. Schorske

INTELLECTUAL LIFE, CIVIL LIBERTARIAN ISSUES, AND THE STUDENT
MOVEMENT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, 1960-1969

With Introductions by
James J. Sheehan

and
Reginald E. Zelnik

Interviews Conducted by

Ann Lage
in 1996 and 1997

Since 195A the Regional Oral History Office has been interviewing leading
participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of
Northern California, the West, and the Nation. Oral history is a method of
collecting historical information through tape-recorded interviews between a
narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-
informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the
historical record. The tape recording is transcribed, lightly edited for
continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The corrected
manuscript is indexed, bound with photographs and illustrative materials, and
placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and in
other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material,
oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete
narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in
response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved,
and irreplaceable.

************************************

All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement
between The Regents of the University of California and Carl E.
Schorske dated October 10, 1999. The manuscript is thereby made
available for research purposes. All literary rights in the
manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The
Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. No part
of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written
permission of the Director of The Bancroft Library of the University
of California, Berkeley.

Requests for permission to quote for publication should be
addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, 486 Library,
University of California, Berkeley 9A720, and should include
identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated
use of the passages, and identification of the user. The legal
agreement with Carl E. Schorske require that he be notified of the
request and allowed thirty days in which to respond.

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

Carl E. Schorske, "Intellectual Life,
Civil Libertarian Issues, and the Student
Movement at the University of California,
Berkeley, 1960-1969," an oral history
conducted in 1996 and 1997 by Ann Lage,
Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft
Library, University of California,
Berkeley, 2000.

Copy no.

Carl Schorske, 1989.

Photo by Jerry Bauer.

Cataloguing information

SCHORSKE, Carl E. (b. 1915) Professor of History

Intellectual Life, Civil Libertarian Issues, and the Student Movement at
the University of California, Berkeley, 1960-1969, 2000, xvi, 203 pp.

From Wesleyan University to the Department of History at Berkeley, 1960;
thoughts on Catholics and Jews in academia; faculty life and politics on
campus and in the history department: the Arts Club, Joseph Kerman, Thomas
Kuhn, Carl Bridenbaugh, Raymond Sontag; chairing the history department,
1962-1963: free speech issues re SLATE and communist speakers on campus;
reflections on the Free Speech Movement, 1964-1965, and faculty response;
assistant chancellor for educational development under Roger Heyns,
1965-1966, campus efforts at educational reform; anti-war and third-world
movements on campus; leaving Berkeley for Princeton, 1969; Schorske's
teaching and writings on European intellectual history.

Introductions by James J. Sheehan, professor of history, Stanford
University, and Reginald E. Zelnik, professor of history, UC
Berkeley.

Interviewed 1996, 1997 by Ann Lage for the Department of History at
Berkeley Series, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library,
University of California, Berkeley.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Bancroft Library, on behalf of future researchers,

wishes to thank the following persons and organizations

whose contributions have made possible the oral histories in

the Department of History at Berkeley series.

Department of History, University of California, Berkeley

with funds from the

Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professorship of European History
A.F. and May T. Morrison Professorship of History

Jane K. Sather Chair in History
Abraham D. Shepard Chair in History

and the following individuals:

Carroll Brentano

Delmer M. Brown

Gene A. Brucker

Randolph and Frances Starn

In Memory of Ursula Griswold Blngham:

Dana T. Bartholomew

James Tyler Patterson, Jr.

John S. Service

TABLE OF CONTENTS- -Carl E. Schorske

PREFACE i

INTRODUCTION by James J. Sheehan iv

INTRODUCTION by Reginald E. Zelnik vii

INTERVIEW HISTORY by Ann Lage xiii

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION xvi

I COMING TO BERKELEY, 1960: TOWN, CAMPUS, AND THE DEPARTMENT OF
HISTORY 1
The View from Wesleyan of the Loyalty Oath Controversy 1
Lecturing at Berkeley, 1959: The Excitement of the Public

University 3
Settling In: Social Connections, and Thoughts on Catholicism and

Academia 5
Entering the Intellectual Life of the Campus: The Arts Club and

Other Interdisciplinary Connections 8

The Postwar Generation's Interest in Intellectual History 10
Intradepartmental Politics: Thomas Kuhn, Carl Bridenbaugh,

Raymond Sontag 11

A Vocational Mission and a Humanistic View of History 14

Involvement in Civil Libertarian Issues 17
Political Tolerance within the History Department, the Nature

of the Discipline 18

II FREE SPEECH ISSUES AT BERKELEY 24
Appointed Chair of the Department, 1962 24
Organizing a Historians' Petition on the Bay of Pigs 25
Protesting University Policies on Slate and the Use of the

University Name 26
Sponsoring an Off -Campus Colloquium with Herbert Aptheker,

March 1963 28
Moderating the Appearance of Mickey Lima, First American

Communist to Speak on Campus, July 1963 31
Thoughts on the University in Society, and Instability and

Intellectual Creativity 33

Shifting Political Spectrums in the Sixties 37

Free Speech Movement --Some Recollections 38

The Emergency Executive Committee: Selection and Role 38

Interpreting the University to Alumni and Regents 43

Resentments toward Clark Kerr 44

Beyond Free Speech: Filthy Speech, Sexual Liberation, Anti-War,

Third World, and Women's Movements 47

Liberating the Educational Imagination 50

III FACULTY RETENTION AND RECRUITMENT, AND DIVERSITY ON CAMPUS IN

THE SIXTIES 55

Some Departing Faculty: Landes, Rosovsky, and Kuhn 55

Thorough, Comparative Searches for New Faculty in History 58

George Stocking, Robert Paxton, Werner Angress 59

Promoting to Tenure from within the Department 63

Considerations in Hiring a Historian 66
Women Faculty and Grad Students, and an Aside on Raymond Sontag 69
Religious and Cultural Diversity and Prejudices, in Society and

on Campus 73

Social Diversity at Berkeley in the Sixties 78

Thomas Kuhn: A Historian and Philosopher of Science 79

IV MORE REFLECTIONS ON THE FREE SPEECH MOVEMENT 86
Maintaining Freedom of Thought in a Public University 86
Opposing Centralization: The Byrne Report 87
Press Treatment of FSM 91
A Memorable Meeting with FSM Leaders 95
Teaching and the Intellectual Atmosphere during FSM 96

V EDUCATIONAL REFORM AND CULTURAL CHANGE IN THE WAKE OF FSM 100
Charles Muscatine and the Commission on Educational Reform 100
Cultural Side Issues to the Free Speech "Revolution" 103
Personal Response to Cultural Changes of the Sixties 106
A Range of Responses to a Revolutionary Situation: Heyns ,

Meyerson, Searle, and the "Yellow Submarine" 109

Efforts to Improve Faculty-Student Dialogue 112

Considering Corresponding Changes in Catholicism 118

Rethinking and Adapting Academic Traditions 121

Media Representations of Berkeley Teaching: "Berkeley Rebels" 123

Architectural Re-formation 125

Legacies of the Sixties: Institutional and Intellectual 127

Responding to the Postwar Shift to Formalism 127

Difficulty of Constructing the Grand Narrative: Fin-de-

slecJe Vienna 130

Leaving Berkeley for Princeton, 1969 133

TAPE GUIDE 138

APPENDIX

A Carl E. Schorske, A Life of Learning. Charles Homer

Haskins Lecture, Apr. 23, 1987; American Council of

Learned Societies, ACSL Occasional Paper No. 1 139
B Memorandum to President Kerr and Chancellor Strong on

the suspension of SLATE, August 23, 1961 151

C Letter re use of the university's name, June 11, 1962 154
D Letter re History Colloquium with Herbert Aptheker,

March 13, 1963 156
E Letters re the appearance of Albert Lima on campus

in July 1963 159
F "Professional Ethics and Public Crisis: A Historian's

Reflections," by Carl E. Schorske, March 1968 166

G List of nominees to Emergency Executive Committee,

December 8, 1964 172

H Proposal for graduate program in cultural history,

December 1965 175

I Carl E. Schorske, Curriculum Vitae 181

INDEX 187

UNIVERSITY HISTORY SERIES LIST 192

PREFACE TO THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY AT BERKELEY ORAL HISTORY SERIES

The Department of History at Berkeley oral history series grew out
of Gene Brucker's (Professor of History, 1954-1991) 1995 Faculty
Research Lecture on "History at Berkeley." In developing his lecture on
the transformations in the UC Berkeley Department of History in the
latter half of the twentieth century, Brucker, whose tenure as professor
of history from 1954 to 1991 spanned most of this period, realized how
much of the story was undocumented.

Discussion with Carroll Brentano (M.A. History, 1951, Ph.D.
History, 1967), coordinator of the University History Project at the
Center for Studies in Higher Education, history department faculty wife,
and a former graduate student in history, reinforced his perception that
a great deal of the history of the University and its academic culture
was not preserved for future generations. The Department of History,
where one might expect to find an abiding interest in preserving a
historical record, had discarded years of departmental files, and only a
fraction of history faculty members had placed their personal papers in
the Bancroft Library.1

Moreover, many of the most interesting aspects of the history—the
life experiences, cultural context, and personal perceptions—were only
infrequently committed to paper.2 They existed for the most part in the
memories of the participants.

Carroll Brentano knew of the longtime work of the Regional Oral
History Office (ROHO) in recording and preserving the memories of
participants in the history of California and the West and the special
interest of ROHO in the history of the University. She and Gene Brucker
then undertook to involve Ann Lage, a ROHO interviewer /editor who had
conducted a number of oral histories in the University History Series
and was herself a product of Berkeley's history department (B.A. 1963,
M.A. 1965). In the course of a series of mutually enjoyable luncheon

'The Bancroft Library holds papers from history professors Walton
Bean, Woodbridge Bingham, Herbert Bolton, Woodrow Borah, George
Guttridge, John Hicks, Joseph Levenson, Henry May, William Alfred
Morris, Frederic Paxson, Herbert Priestley, Engel Sluiter, Raymond
Sontag.

2Two published memoirs recall the Berkeley history department: John
D. Hicks, My Life with History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1968) recalls his years as professor and dean, 1942-1957; Henry F. May
reflects on his years as an undergraduate at Berkeley in the thirties in
Coming to Terms (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).

meetings, the project to document the history of the Department of
History at Berkeley evolved.

In initial discussions about the parameters of the project, during
which the varied and interesting lives of the history faculty were
considered, a crucial decision was made. Rather than conduct a larger
set of short oral histories focussed on topics limited to departmental
history, we determined to work with selected members of the department
to conduct more lengthy biographical memoirs. We would record relevant
personal background- -family, education, career choices, marriage and
children, travel and avocations; discuss other institutional
affiliations; explore the process of creating their historical works;
obtain reflections on their retirement years. A central topic for each
would be, of course, the Department of History at Berkeley — its
governance, the informal and formal relationships among colleagues, the
connections with the broader campus, and curriculum and teaching at both
the graduate and undergraduate level.

Using the Brucker lecture as a point of departure, it was decided
to begin to document the group of professors who came to the department
in the immediate postwar years, the 1950s, and the early 1960s. Now
retired, the younger ones somewhat prematurely because of a university
retirement incentive offer in the early nineties, this group was the one
whose distinguished teaching and publications initially earned the
Department of History its high national rating. They made the crucial
hiring and promotion decisions that cemented the department's strength
and expanded and adapted the curriculum to meet new academic interests.

At the same time, they participated in campus governing bodies as
the university dealt with central social, political, and cultural issues
of our times, including challenges to civil liberties and academic
freedom, the response to tumultuous student protests over free speech,
civil rights and the Vietnam War, and the demands for equality of
opportunity for women and minorities. And they benefitted from the
postwar years of demographic and economic growth in California
accompanied for the most part through the 1980s with expanding budgets
for higher education. Clearly, comprehensive oral histories discussing
the lives and work of this group of professors would produce narratives
of interest to researchers studying the developments in the discipline
of history, higher education in the modern research university, and
postwar California, as well as the institutional history of the
University of California.

Carroll Brentano and Gene Brucker committed themselves to
facilitate the funding of the oral history project, as well as to enlist
the interest of potential memoirists in participating in the process.
Many members of the department responded with interest, joined the
periodic lunch confabs, offered advice in planning, and helped find
funding to support the project. In the spring of 1996, the interest of

iii

the department in its own history led to an afternoon symposium,
organized by Brentano and Professor of History Sheldon Rothblatt and
titled "Play It Again, Sam." There, Gene Brucker restaged his Faculty
Research Lecture. Professor Henry F. May responded with his own
perceptions of events, followed by comments on the Brucker and May
theses from other history faculty, all videotaped for posterity and the
Bancroft Library.1

Meanwhile, the oral history project got underway with interviews
with Delmer Brown, professor of Japanese history; Nicholas Riasanovsky,
Russian ana European intellectual history; and Kenneth Stampp, American
history. A previously conducted oral history with Woodrow Borah, Latin
American history, was uncovered and placed in The Bancroft Library. An
oral history with Carl Schorske, European intellectual history, is in
process at the time of this writing, and more are in the works. The
selection of memoirists for the project is determined not only by the
high regard in which they are held by their colleagues, because that
would surely overwhelm us with candidates, but also by their willingness
to commit the substantial amount of time and thought to the oral history
process. Age, availability of funding, and some attention to a balance
in historical specialties also play a role in the selection order.

The enthusiastic response of early readers has reaffirmed for the
organizers of this project that departmental histories and personal
memoirs are essential to the unraveling of some knotty puzzles: What
kind of a place is this University of California, Berkeley, to which we
have committed much of our lives? What is this academic culture in
which we are enmeshed? And what is this enterprise History, in which we
all engage? As one of the project instigators reflected, "Knowing what
was is essential; and as historians we know the value of sources, even
if they are ourselves." The beginnings are here in these oral
histories .

Carroll Brentano, Coordinator

University History Project

Center for Studies in Higher Education

Gene Brucker

Shepard Professor of History Emeritus

Ann Lage, Principal Editor
May 1999 Regional Oral History Office

'The Brucker lecture and May response, with an afterword by David
Hollinger, are published in History at Berkeley: A Dialog in Three Parts
(Chapters in the History of the University of California, Number Seven),
Carroll Brentano and Sheldon Rothblatt, editors [Center for Studies in
Higher Education and Institute of Governmental Studies, University of
California, Berkeley, 1998].

March 2000

University History Series, Department of History at Berkeley

Series List

Brown, Delmer M. Professor of Japanese History, University of California,
Berkeley, 1946-1977. 2000, 500 pp.

May, Henry F. Professor of American Intellectual History, University of
California, Berkeley, 1952-1980. 1999, 218 pp.

Riasanovsky, Nicholas V. Professor of Russian and European Intellectual
History, University of California, Berkeley, 1957-1997. 1998, 310 pp.

Schorske, Carl E. Intellectual Life, Civil Libertarian Issues, and the
Student Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, 1960-1969.
2000, 203 pp.

Stampp, Kenneth M. Historian of Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction,
University of California, Berkeley, 1946-1983. 1998, 310 pp.

In process:

Bouwsma, William J., professor of European cultural history

Smith, Thomas C., professor of Japanese history

INTRODUCTION by James J. Sheehan

Among the few lectures notes that have survived from my many years
of formal education are six tattered pages with the dates, Wednesday,
October 7 and Friday, October 9, 1959. The course was Raymond J.
Sontag's "Intellectual History of Europe," the place, Room 155, Dwinelle
Hall, the subject, Hegel, and the lecturer, Carl E. Schorske, who had
been invited to fill in while Ray Sontag was out of town. Together with
the other graduate student assistants in the course, I had awaited
Schorske 's appearance with interest and anticipation. Of course, we did
not know that this would mark the beginning of his association with
Berkeley — and, for some of us, of four decades of friendship—but we had
heard a good deal about him. He was supposed to be a brilliant teacher,
his book on Social Democracy was required reading for every serious
student of German history, and we had heard rumors that he had turned
down offers from both Berkeley and Harvard in order to stay at Wesleyan,
decisions that seemed, to me at least, somewhat noble and very
eccentric.

Even without the aid of my notes, I have a vivid recollection of
Carl's two lectures on Hegel, which displayed his characteristic blend
of rhetorical power and intellectual energy. Without losing sight of
the text at hand (Hegel's lectures on the philosophy of history), he
established connections between Hegel and his historical setting,
explained the cultural traditions within which he worked, and then
suggested the implications of his ideas for the evolution of German
thought. But what made these two lectures — and the many others I heard
after Carl began teaching at Berkeley— so memorable was not simply
Carl's command of the material and his verbal brilliance, but also his
ability to invite his listeners to join him in a common enterprise and
thus to transform them from his audience into his companions on a shared
intellectual journey. There was always a certain openness and
spontaneity in Schorske 's lectures; rather than present a finished
product they illustrated an ongoing inquiry. This was, I think, the
most important source of the excitement with which his lecture room was
always charged.

As a graduate teacher, Carl had the same ability to inform,
engage, and inspire, and always to do so without arrogance or
intimidation. I remember our first conversation about my ideas — if that
is what my random inclinations and inchoate ambitions can be called—for
a dissertation. Rather than suggesting possible topics or simply
assigning me something to work on, Carl told me about the books he had
recently read that seemed to suggest new and interesting ways of
thinking about intellectual history: Kaegi's biography of Burckhardt,
Gollwitzer's book on the Standesherren. and a few others. Clearly I was
not going to be able to write such books (in fact, at that point I was

barely able to read them) , but he offered them to me as sources of
stimulation and inspiration, models towards which to strive. This made
me feel like a colleague, with whom he could share his current
enthusiasms, and not like a pupil in need of direction. As my own
research plans began to form, then collapsed, and finally jelled, he was
always attentive, sometimes critical—but never intrusive, overbearing,
or discouraging. He was, moreover, extremely diligent in the quotidian
dimensions of the graduate teacher's responsibilities—writing letters
of recommendation, returning draft chapters, and the like— the
difficulties of which I now understand and appreciate much better than I
did at the time.

When Carl came to Berkeley, his scholarly reputation rested on his
book about German Social Democracy, which sought to explain the party's
split in 1917 in terms of deeply-rooted structural and ideological
divisions within the labor movement. Although I am now somewhat
skeptical about the book's central argument (it seems to me that the
immediate impact of the war played a more important role in the party's
divisions than Carl's structural analysis would suggest), it is still
one of the books I most like to read with my graduate students. It is,
in the first place, a beautifully conceived and powerfully sustained
historical analysis, clearly written, elegantly researched, and filled
with well-chosen examples. Moreover- -and this is always the sign of
first-rate history— it tells us about much more than its ostensible
subject: in this case, about the political and social problems of the
German Empire, the interaction of ideology and organization, and— last
but not least— the political climate in which the book itself was
written. Although after this book, Carl moved away from political
history, politics always remained central to his scholarly vocation,
which was indelibly marked by the two central crises of his generation:
the rise of National Socialism in the thirties, which shadowed his years
as an undergraduate as well as his wartime service with the OSS, and the
emergence of the Cold War in the forties and early fifties, which shaped
his own relationship to American politics.

By the time Carl arrived in Berkeley, he had already begun to work
on culture in Vienna around the turn of the century. I recall hearing
him describe this project to a packed audience of faculty and students
in the Alumni House; parts of it appeared in his course on European
Intellectual History, which I audited in 1960-61. For a variety of
reasons- -not least among them Carl's engagement with the events that are
described in what follows — the book he planned to write was never
written in the narrative form he had originally intended. Instead, he
produced a series of essays that were eventually published in 1980 as
Fin-de-Siecle Vienna, a book that has been widely and deeply influential
across the usual disciplinary boundaries. The connecting themes uniting
these essays are the collapse of Austrian liberalism and the rise of
cultural modernism, which worked together to generate an unresolved
tension between political pathology and cultural creativity. In Fin-de-

vii

Siecle Vienna, and in the many essays that he has written since (some
now collected as Thinking with History [Princeton University Press,
1998]), Carl Schorske has illuminated the complex connections between
politics and culture, his major concern as a scholar and, for the years
that he was at Berkeley, the object of his efforts as an academic
citizen caught up in the affairs of a great university in crisis.

James J. Sheehan
Professor of History

November 1999
Stanford, California

viii

INTRODUCTION by Reginald E. Zelnik

Carl Schorske and Berkeley's Time of Troubles

We read in Jim Sheehan's illuminating introduction to Carl
Schorske 's oral history that politics always remained central to
Schorske 's "scholarly vocation"; and at the end of the essay Jim refers
to Carl as "an academic citizen caught up in the affairs of a great
university in crisis." I was present at Berkeley for the last five
years of Carl's involvement as an "academic citizen," and I write, in
part, to bear witness to the power and integrity of his political,
intellectual and moral presence, which represented the very best that
our faculty had to offer in that time of troubles. Other than at the
most abstract analytical level, it would surely be a mistake to think of
politics and scholarship as two distinct domains in which Carl would or
could function in a bifurcated manner. In real life—real political
life and, to Carl, real scholarly life as well—the two arenas were
always intermeshed and intermingled. There were major conflicts between
them, to be sure, yet never in the prosaic sense that one was somehow
debasing or corrupting the integrity of the other. Here at Berkeley,
politics — taken in the broadest meaning of dedication to the well-being
of the polis and promotion of the just use of power— remained central to
Carl's scholarly vocation, to both his research and his teaching, while
intellectual values were no less central to his political concerns. He
saw the university as a community where politics and scholarship not
only could coexist, but could strengthen one another, though never
without the presence of powerful and often unresolved tensions. When in
1969 he departed Berkeley for calmer waters if not greener pastures, I
believe that though troubled by the experience of the previous years, he
had not abandoned his guarded faith in the contentious but ultimately
peaceful coexistence of these two worlds.

As readers will learn from the oral history that follows, Carl
joined our history faculty in the fall of 1960, having been attracted to
the university while lecturing here in 1959 in Raymond Sontag's class,
as noted in Jim's introduction. It should come as no surprise that very
little time had passed before Carl began to involve himself in campus
controversies. His left political background, after all, dated back to
the rich and lively undergraduate political life at Columbia University
in the early 1930s, but also, with a backward stretch, to 1919, his
kindergarten year in New York, when this little son of a socialist
banker had a near escape from "campus discipline" for singing a German
song, Morgenrot. that offended the anti-German sensitivities of a
patriotic kindergarten teacher. An active supporter of the
controversial Henry Wallace campaign in 1948, and still an independent
man of the liberal left in the sixties, Carl came to Berkeley at a time
when the seeds of the 1964 conflict around free speech were already
being planted by an unwitting combination of vestigial but still

forceful McCarthyism, which often targeted the university, and a growing
movement of protest and resistance among a resolute minority of faculty
and students. Administrators, for their part, groped for intricate and
often perplexing ways to resist recurrent onslaughts from the right,
tacking now in the direction of significant resistance, now in the
direction of outright surrender, at times even surrendering with
pleasure .

The most salient form such conflicts took—though more quietly,
more subdued, more civilly, and on a much smaller scale than what soon
would follow—was faculty resistance to the banning of controversial
speakers from the campus. "Controversial" at the time was generally
equated with "Communist," though the term also extended to religious
speakers (the banning of Malcolm X neatly combined both cases). In such
situations, as Carl explains, it was faculty—small groups, to be sure-
more than students who took the lead in resisting suppressive measures,
though faculty methods were characteristically unf lamboyant,
superficially unconfrontational, and always imbued with academic
politesse.

Carl had barely been on our faculty a year, for example, before he
joined a little group of civil libertarian professors— signif icantly,
four of the eight participants would be active in the faculty "200"
during the free speech crisis of 1964— who wrote to President Kerr and
Chancellor Strong in 1961 to protest the suspension of SLATE, an
activist student organization. Anticipating some of the issues that
rocked the campus three years layer, Schorske and the others asserted
that "the interpretation of the State Constitution as restricting
student political activity is questionable and should receive further
study." At the same time, again anticipating Schorske 's disposition in
1964 and beyond, always characterized by a quest for cooperation,
reasonableness and workable solutions, the letter generously
acknowledged the "liberalizing measures" recently instituted by the
university administration and its (partial) defense of the open forum
from outside pressures. The concluding paragraph nicely illustrates the
mood of faculty such as Carl who, anxious to encourage positive change,
animated in a sense by "civilizing mission," often found themselves face
to face with administrators who did not always share their outlook. "We
have no wish to magnify disagreements," Carl and the others wrote. "As
faculty members, we try to make ourselves available to the problems of
students, and we hope that a dialogue with you, from time to time, will
be welcomed as creative and enlightening."1

A year later Carl was writing to the Academic Senate's Academic
Freedom Committee in support of a faculty resolution taking issue with a

1 V. Kennedy, L. Lowenthal, C. Schorske et al. to Kerr and Strong,
23 Aug. 1961, Bancroft Collection (see Appendix B).

university policy that prohibited faculty from citing their university
affiliation when taking positions on non-university issues.2 Shortly
thereafter, in 1963, now in his new capacity as history department
chairman, Carl was again in the midst of his soon-to-be uninterrupted
campus engagement, as he led the department's unsuccessful efforts to
allow the historian Herbert Aptheker, a leading member of the Communist
party, to speak on campus under the auspices of its graduate colloquium
series. (The event did take place, but in the YMCA's Stiles Hall, off
campus, with members of the department taking up a collection for the
speaker's fee!).3 Then, in a related case again involving the
appearance at a public gathering by another Communist speaker, Schorske
took upon himself the burden of presiding over the meeting, an action
that predictably led to angry letters from right-wing protesters while
earning him the praise of the chancellor and the president (both of whom
apparently expected some kind of disturbance that never materialized).
In all these cases it was some combination of academic freedom, civil
liberties and free speech that was at issue, principles that were always
at the very top of Schorske 's list. As he put it in a letter to the
general secretary of the University YMCA, "the unfavorable returns
[about his chairing of the meeting] are coming in; but no one interested
in civil liberties can escape this sort of thing... (T]he price is
pretty small considering what is at stake."4

The crisis Carl was faced with in the fall of 1964, while again
revolving around issues of free speech and, more remotely, academic
freedom, were of a scale that dwarfed the episodes just described, and,
in sharp contrast, involved for the first time a mass student movement,
the Free Speech Movement [FSM] . It would have gone completely against
his grain for Carl to avoid engagement in this conflict. He plunged
into it quickly enough, and of course had little trouble identifying
with the causes of free speech and advocacy rights for students, their
right to due process, fair disciplinary procedures, and, an often
ignored but very serious consideration, respectful treatment. He viewed
with growing dismay the heavy-handedness of administration policy, which
radicalized the movement and turned a local conflict into one of
statewide and ultimately national proportions. But at the same time,
like so many other members of the faculty, including even most of those
who shared his sympathy for the movement's aims, he was also disturbed
by the prospect that the already burgeoning politicization of university

2 Schorske to Chairman of Committee on Academic Freedom, 11 June

1962, loc. cit.

3 Schorske to Chairman of Committee on Academic Freedom, 13 Mar.

1963, loc. cit. (see Appendix D) . The total ban on Communist speakers
on campus was lifted the following summer.

' Schorske to W.J. Davis, 31 July 1963, loc. cit. (see Appendix E).
The speaker this time was Albert Lima.

life — and this was even before the "Vietnamization" of our campus --would
have a negative effect on our academic milieu. Delighting in our
students' desire to act like citizens, he believed in principle that
this citizenship could be reconciled with academic decorum. He
therefore spent much time and energy in quest of a solution to the free
speech conflict that would speedily reduce the turmoil while upholding
the values that underlay the struggle of the FSM. He welcomed the
sound, but hoped perhaps for less of the fury. He was, as he once
described himself in explaining his approach to history, "at once wary

Much of Carl's efforts during the FSM took place at meetings with
like-minded faculty (several of them signers of the 1961 letter
mentioned above) in Professor Charles Sellers' history department
office. As a new, very junior member of the history faculty, I had of
course met "Professor Schorske" several times by then, and already knew
and admired his superb study of German Social Democracy; I actually
first knew of him, and already admired him in 1961, when, as a Stanford
graduate student, I saw an ad on the Bay of Pigs crisis that he and
other history professors, mainly from Berkeley and Stanford, had placed
in the Times. But it was at these little "strategy meetings" in
Sellers' office that I really got to know Carl, to see him in action, to
observe his craftsmanship and draftsmanship in helping to hammer out
appropriate language for larger faculty meetings that we hoped would
meet the principles of the FSM and still be acceptable to a large enough
faculty majority to sway the administration, appealing to its better
self. In fact, as I am sure Carl would acknowledge, none of the
dedicated work of that little group achieved its purpose, at least not
directly. The (Larry) Levine motion—a futile but honorable attempt in
November to move the faculty senate in the direction of the FSM
position—and other comparable endeavors would fail to win over a
faculty majority until a combination of patently vengeful disciplinary
action by the then chancellor and a bold new act of civil disobedience
by the FSM transfigured the atmosphere and created the climate for the
assertiveness of the faculty 200 and finally for the stunning victory
for free speech that took place in the Academic Senate on December 8.

It is impossible, in my view, to designate a single author of the
December 8 resolutions, which in some ways went significantly further
than earlier draft resolutions prepared by faculty supporters of free

5 Carl E. Schorske, A Life of Learning (ACLS Occasional Paper No.
1, 1987), p. 3. That paper provides a useful supplement to the present
oral history (see Appendix A). It is reprinted in Thinking with
History: Explorations in the Passage to Modernism (Princeton, 1998), pp.
17-34.

xii

speech.' At one level the true authors of the resolutions were Mario
Savio and other FSM-ers, who had long since laid out the basic
principles that those resolutions followed. But the resolutions were
also a permutation over time of language created at the meetings in
Sellers' office, at November meetings of the Academic Senate, at the
meeting of the 200 itself, and at the huge informal December 3 gathering
of faculty in Wheeler Auditorium called by panicky faculty who had not
been strong supporters of the FSM, but were now prepared to heed the
views of the Schorskes, Stampps, Schachmans, Smiths, Sellers, Searles,
Selznicks, Wolins, Lowenthals, and Levines, to name but a few. While it
would take an archeologist to reveal all the layers of authorship--
broadly conceived they of course antedated the FSM itself, drawing upon
a much longer history of campus battles for academic freedom and civil
liberties—no one involved in this affair could deny that the hand and
mind of Carl Schorske was a presence at virtually every stage of this
evolving story.

Although the Regents' official response to the December 8
resolutions fell short of a straightforward endorsement, and although
there were to be on occasion temporary retreats from the robust
enforcement of the resolutions, it is fair to say that a genuine victory
for free speech principles had indeed been achieved through the combined
efforts of an aggressive student movement and a faltering but ultimately
responsive faculty. Yet one of the ironic, unforeseen (and, I certainly
felt at the time, disheartening) consequences of the December 8
resolutions was the election of a faculty committee, the "Emergency
Executive Committee," which, though its purpose was to secure the
acceptance of the resolutions by the president and Board of Regents,
consisted almost entirely of faculty members who, though moderates by
most standards, prior to the December turnaround had to varying degrees
been hostile to the FSM and, more to the point, impatient with its
faculty friends. To this outcome there was only one exception, Carl,
who came in seventh in the field of seven elected members of that
committee, the sole representative of the 200 to survive a well
organized faculty backlash that swept the elections under the banner of
order and stability. If the election results reveal a great deal about
the complex blend of motives that went into the voting on December 8,
Carl's (bare) survival as the sole representative of what I still refer
to as "our group" (and, not incidentally, as the sole representative of
the liberal arts) was certainly a tribute to the great respect for him

6 Strictly speaking the resolutions were the work of the Senate's
Academic Freedom Committee, which formally introduced them at the
December 8 meeting. But while I have no doubt that they were vetted and
edited by that committee, it is equally clear that the committee was
sticking very closely to a version of the text that emerged after much
heated debate from the December 3 meeting at Wheeler Auditorium.

xiii

that prevailed even in sectors of the faculty whose views he did not
share.

As it turned out, Carl was able to cooperate effectively with the
other members of the committee, which to a great extent did accomplish
its primary goal, winning the Regents' (guarded) acquiescence to most of
the December 8 package. Yet the spring of 1965 marked the beginning of
several years of unrelenting tension and intermittent anguish for him,
as he was prevented by his very nature from resisting the continuous
call of duty, placing him in pivotal positions, constantly serving the
campus community, always on call, and at times, as he puts it here,
"eaten up." He even joined the administration as special officer in
charge of academic development for a brief period, but, as his interview
reveals, he grew increasingly uncomfortable with what he saw as the
rigid policies of the Roger Heyns administration. More and more Carl's
engagement and commitment tore him away from the scholarship (though
never from the teaching and teaching innovation) that he so adored. In
his own words (though he refers here to his time as a graduate student
at Harvard, not his time at Berkeley): "When political passions run
strong, the relation between one's obligations to the republic of
letters and to the civic republic can become dangerously conflated."'
In academic year 1968-69 escalating war and, as a consequence, more ugly
and bitter campus confrontations added to these tensions and temporarily
destroyed the "delicate balance" that had seemed to prevail after
December 8.8 Carl then made his decision, without a trace of rancor, to
leave us for Princeton, where he continued under more placid conditions
to display the same qualities of scholar-citizen we at Berkeley had come
to appreciate so much. I know that Carl continued to love Berkeley
after he left and loves it to this day.

Reginald Zelnik
Professor of History

February 2000
Berkeley, California

7 A Life of Learning, p. 7.

* Carl speaks of the "delicate balance" between academic and
political rights and related commitments in ibid., p. 15.

xiv
INTERVIEW HISTORY- -Carl E. Schorske

Carl E. Schorske, professor emeritus at Princeton University,
spent only a decade, from 1960 to 1969, as a member of the UC Berkeley
Department of History. But what a decade! and what an active member of
the university community he was during his tenure on the Berkeley
campus. Knowing that his account would add an important perspective to
the history of those times, in 1996 we invited him to record his
recollections as the fourth memoirist in the Department of History at
Berkeley Oral History Series.

Rather than trying to conduct a lengthy biographical oral history
during Professor Schorske 's visits to the Bay Area, we focused on his
experiences at Berkeley and his perspective on the social, cultural, and
political shifts that characterized his decade here. For background on
his family and education, his mentors at Columbia and Harvard, and his
fourteen years of teaching at Wesleyan University, we have appended his
Charles Homer Haskin Lecture, "A Life of Learning," given to the
American Council of Learned Societies in April 1987.

The oral history begins with Professor Schorske 's introduction to
Berkeley as a guest lecturer in Raymond Sontag's European intellectual
history class in 1959. He describes being "dazzled" by the charged
atmosphere of the large lecture hall and by the socially diverse student
body of the public university. The following year he accepted the
department's invitation to join its ranks as a full professor.

His oral history records how he plunged into the life of the
university, relishing the opportunities to exchange ideas with like-
minded faculty in departments across the campus. He participated
actively in the governance of the Department of History and was chosen
as chair of the department just two years after his arrival at Berkeley.
He provides significant recollections of fellow faculty members and of
the social and intellectual atmosphere of the department.

Soon after his arrival, Professor Schorske Joined faculty efforts
to expand free speech for members of the university community. His oral
history, and the appended documents, provide historians with an
important record of faculty initiatives from 1961 to 1963 to broaden the
rights of political expression within a public university, in an era
when Communists were prevented from speaking on campus, as were
candidates for public office of any persuasion.

A substantial part of the oral history is devoted to the 1964-1965
Free Speech Movement and other student protests in the sixties.
Professor Schorske discusses his role in events as a member of the
Academic Senate's Emergency Executive Committee during the FSM, his

thoughts about educational reform, and his reflections on the personal
reactions of himself and fellow faculty to the enormous cultural changes
of the time. All considered, with his characteristic intellectual
breadth, within the context of "how the republic of letters relates to
the civil society."

The interview sessions for the oral history were scheduled around
two of Professor Schorske's visits to the West Coast, where he travels
periodically as a member of the advisory boards of the Stanford
Humanities Institute and the Getty Center for Art History and the
Humanities, and for family vacations in Inverness on the Point Reyes
Peninsula. The first session took place on October 17, 1996, in his
hotel room in San Francisco. Although he and his wife had just arrived
by plane from the East Coast, he was willing to sit down for nearly
three hours of interviewing before going off to another engagement that
evening. As a student in Professor Schorske's European intellectual
history class in the early sixties, I recalled very well the charged
atmosphere in his lectures and found that he brought that same
excitement to our interview, despite his demanding schedule. Although
he complains of his octogenarian memory, his intellectual and physical
energy seems unabated.

We were not able to meet again until May 5, 1997, this time in a
seminar room of The Bancroft Library. The following day we completed
our interviewing at the home of Robert and Carroll Brentano, history
colleagues and friends from his time in the Department of History at
Berkeley.

The long hiatus between the first and the second interviews
naturally created some disjointedness in the narrative. Issues covered
hurriedly during our first meeting were revisited in the final two
sessions. In the interim between October and May, Berkeley historian
David Bellinger had contributed his ideas for areas to explore, which
led to some backtracking and elaborating on subjects previously
discussed. No attempt was made to integrate these two discussions
during the editing process, since each had its own character and
emphasis.

After light editing, the transcripts of the three sessions went to
Professor Schorske for his review. He expressed disappointment with the
impressionistic nature of his recollections and the frailty of memory.
He made a careful review of the transcript, clarifing some statements
and adding considerable details. He checked recollections against
documents in his files and contributed several important documents for
appendices. In the end, he was persuaded to let the transcript stand
without further alterations. We assured him that we would add the
caveat that it provided a personal account, not a final, verified record
of events; that along with other oral histories in the series it would
enable future scholars to assemble from varying perspectives, in concert

xvi

with written documents, a sense of the life of the university and the
discipline of history.

The editing process took time, on both coasts. Other projects
competed for oral history office staff time, and Professor Schorske was
writing two books. "Since the oral history is for eternal consumption,
I count on your generous disposition to forgive my procrastination," he
petitioned in one interchange. Editorial assistant Sara Diamond
prepared the final version of the transcript and assembled the appended
material. By summer of 1999, the project was ready for the eye of
former university archivist James R. K. Kantor, ROHO's proofreader par
excellence.

Professor Reginald Zelnik, a Berkeley colleague also active in the
political affairs of the campus during the sixties, and James Sheehan,
professor of history at Stanford University and a former Schorske Ph.D.
student at Berkeley, wrote the two introductions to the volume. We
thank both men for their contributions.

On behalf of future scholars, we also thank the Department of
History for providing the core funding to make this oral history
possible. Appreciation is once again due Carroll Brentano and Gene
Brucker for initiating the series on the history of the Department of
History and for their ongoing efforts in planning and securing support
to continue it. Additional support came from the Bancroft Library's
Free Speech Movement Archives project, funded by a generous donation
from Berkeley alumnus Stephen M. Silberstein, and the Schorske volume
will be a part of the Free Speech Movement Oral History Series.

The Regional Oral History Office was established in 1954 to record
the lives of persons who have contributed significantly to the history
of California and the West. A major focus of the office since its
inception has been university history. The series list of completed
oral histories documenting the history of the University of California
is included in this volume. The Regional Oral History Office is a
division of The Bancroft Library and is under the direction of Willa K.
Baum.

Ann Lage
Interviewer /Editor

Regional Oral History Office
The Bancroft Library
University of California, Berkeley
November 1999

xv ii

Regional Oral History Office University of California

Room 486 The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California 94720

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
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SIGNATURE ( Cl^J/ <• - <7UuM.'l^ DATE:

INTERVIEW WITH CARL SCHORSKE

COMING TO BERKELEY, 1960: TOWN, CAMPUS, AND THE DEPARTMENT
OF HISTORY

[Interview 1: October 17, 1996] ff

The View from Wesleyan of the Loyalty Oath Controversy

Lage: This is October 19, 1996, and this is an interview with Carl
Schorske for the history of the Department of History series.
We're not going to start with your early background because we
only have a three-hour session now. We want to talk about your
coming to Berkeley, why you came and how you happened to make
the change from Wesleyan.

Schorske: Two things. The first is that I was actually courted by

Berkeley's department well before I came. I came in 1960, but
in either 1955 or 1956--it was probably '55, could have been
'56--after my first book came out, I was given an invitation to
come to look at Berkeley. I was then at Wesleyan; I was happy
at Wesleyan. I was very suspicious of California because of
the loyalty oath controversy, which was a very little time
before. We're talking now late McCarthy era. McCarthy had
already been broken by the time this invitation was issued.

We had at Wesleyan two refugees from Berkeley. One was
Charles Muscatine, who figures certainly in your oral
histories, and the other was Tom [Thomas] Parkinson, both
members of the English Department. Muscatine was a non-signer
in the oath controversy, and Parkinson- -in the end he did sign,
but he was an opponent. There were many people like that on
the Berkeley campus.

'II This symbol indicates that a tape or tape segment has begun or
ended. A guide to the tapes follows the transcript.

Lage:

They came to Wesleyan as a result of this?

Schorske: Yes, but they came as visitors. Muscatine didn't know what he
would do. In the end he went back because they changed the
regulations. A number of other signers who resigned from
Berkeley because they wouldn't sign the oath-- there were only
twelve, I think, in all—but several of them went back. They
didn't take permanent positions elsewhere. Muscatine didn't
have a permanent position with Berkeley either. As I s«y, they
were refugees, both these guys.

I had a high impression of the scholarly quality of the
university, but I was a small college teacher, and I really
found I loved it. So I didn't have much will to move. The
combination of the oath history and being way out there--!
being an easterner born and bred--.

Lage: You'd never lived on the West Coast, I assume.

Schorske: Right, and I had never been in a state university. I had fear
of it, partly because of the political vulnerability that
Berkeley had manifested and seemed to manifest in a craven way,
in the sense that they didn't fight back. Of course there were
many places where nobody fought, so you never noticed it.

Lage: Did your impressions come from Parkinson and Muscatine, or was
it just known throughout the academic community?

Schorske: No, no, it was diffuse. We had another member of my Wesleyan
department, a wonderful person, who was actually a student of
Ernst Kantorowicz, one of the non-signers. His name was
Michael Cherniavsky in Russian history. We had other Berkeley
people who were connected with this oath thing not as faculty
members but as grad students.

The main thing was that throughout the academic community,
the California oath case was huge. It was the national case of
greatest moment in the early fifties. 1 didn't need the
presence of the refugees, in fact their presence was only a
testimony to the quality of the intellectual life that was also
at Berkeley, and I knew that. Anyway, I turned that first
invitation down.

Lecturing at Berkeley. 1959: The Excitement of the Public
University

Schorske: Then I came as a fellow to the Stanford Center for Advanced

Study in the Behavioral Sciences. I came there for the year in
1959-60. One day I got a telephone call from Ray [Raymond]
Sontag. He was one of the two Berkeley people- -Ray Sontag and
Carl Bridenbaugh--who had courted me in '56 at an American
Historical Association [AHA] meeting.

Ray said he was going back to Washington for a couple of
weeks on government business. Would I take his classes? He
taught an intellectual history course at the time, and would I
take over his classes and give the lectures, two lectures a
week for two weeks? He was on the topic of Hegel, and it was
something I knew about and liked. So I said, "Sure." Of
course I was fond of him because—well, anyway, I knew him
somewhat from before, when he tried to get me an instructorship
in Princeton. That effort failed because of the anti-Semitism
that then prevailed at Princeton. I was very glad to do the
lectures in a way to repay him for having been influential in
getting me the offer from Berkeley.

I really went up for those two weeks just to lecture. I
had friends here- -Henry May who was a strong friend of mine
from graduate school, and Henry Nash Smith in the English
department who was likewise a Harvard friend. I had already
reknit ties with them after the war. Then, when I came to
California, of course somehow we activated our relation.

The main thing was that I came and I lectured to that
class, and I was dazzled. It was such a wonderful experience.
It was one of these big things--! think it was Dwindle Hall,
one of the big lecture halls. It was certainly a big hall. I
hadn't had at Wesleyan that kind of experience. I had lectured
at Harvard also for a term, so I knew what it was like, but
here it was in Berkeley. It was the same thing, where you
really felt the electricity in the classroom.

Then, there were Sontag1 s two teaching assistants. One of
them was Jim [James J.] Sheehan, the fellow who just drove me
here, who as you know is now at Stanford. He's been the
department chairman there for years; he's not anymore. The
other was Peter Loewenberg, who has become a leading
psychohistorian and has been a pillar of the department at Los
Angeles. They were Sontag 's two assistants.

Loewenberg was the nephew of a Berkeley philosopher of the
same name who was the major Hegel scholar in the United States.
He was, however, a non-signer. He was a resister. After just
one lecture on Hegel, Peter Loewenberg invited me to have
dinner at his uncle's house.

Lage : Was he also a Loewenberg?

Schorske: I'm ashamed that I don't remember his first name [Jacob

Loewenberg]. He wrote a kind of compendium of translations of
Hegel's stuff with an introduction that was very well regarded.
I had used his book in my course, actually. It was a
coincidence that he was also one of the resisters in the oath
controversy. So I had this very interesting evening at his
house.

Then I began to catch on that, oath controversy or no, this
was really an exciting place. I loved the class, and the more
it went on, the more I liked it. I mean we got on well.

Lage: Did you find the undergraduate students at Berkeley to be more
exciting?

Schorske: Well, it's partly the mass. It's partly the mass. At

Wesleyan, let's say, a big class, a really big class would be
sixty people. Sontag was a very well-regarded lecturer and for
good cause; his class was 200 or 230 people or something like
that. So it was a big mass of people, and that gives you a
sort of actor's satisfaction. You have a public to play to in
effect, so there was some of that.

I also felt the differentiation in the class, a social
differentiation I had never experienced. I'd taught at Harvard
and Yale for a term here and there but never with that social
diversity, palpably the children of people from the Valley,
some fraternity types, others very urban, all kinds of types in
the class. That sociological mix I found intriguing. It
wasn't pure urban, and it was certainly not pure rural. It was
a state university's mix, and I had never experienced it. One
couldn't experience it except in a few places like Michigan,
Wisconsin, Berkeley, now probably in Texas. Usually you don't
get that mixture of urban and rural, as well as different
classes, different types of culture, really, that compose the
nation. So that struck me.

Then I really did a nervy thing. I called up my friend
Henry May, and I said, "I really have been snowed by these two
weeks. If that job is still open and you people still want me.

I'll take it." So, I was then invited--! think Ken [Kenneth
M.) Stampp was chairman of the department, I'm not sure.

Lage: I don't think so because he's never been chairman. He's always
avoided it.

Schorske: Oh, really? Is that right? Is he one of the people you've
interviewed?

Lage: Yes, I did. It might have been Delmer Brown.

Schorske: No, he was not yet chairman, not then. It probably was George
Guttridge, but never mind, I don't know. That wasn't so
significant. The fact was that I was invited then to give a
paper at the History Club or whatever it was that used to meet
in the Alumni House. That was sort of a test, used when a
department hired you anyplace. I got through, and then I was
invited to come.

Lage: There was a very positive response to that lecture, from what
I've heard.

Schorske: I know, there was. I'm sure I couldn't have been asked if it
hadn't been because I'd already turned them down. You asked
how I got here, and that was how I got here: via the Stanford
Center and then this experience of lecturing and so on.

Lage: And you came as a tenured professor.

Schorske: I came as tenured--! had already gotten tenure at Wesleyan.

Even the original offer was for tenure, and this time it was a
full professorship which I then had.

Settling In; Social Connections, and Thoughts on Catholicism
and Academia

Lage: Was your wife amenable to moving out?

Schorske: Well, she was not that amenable. She became very engaged in

Berkeley, but she was not that enthusiastic at first. It would
have been easier if we'd gone to Stanford which was also a
possibility. We didn't because--! mean, it would have been
easier because our children found wonderful schools at
Stanford. When we came to Berkeley, the situation was much
graver. The high school was still a high school of quality,
and I'm sure parts of it still are, but the new sociology of

Berkeley had begun, and the cultural problem for our two
children who were in junior high—or one Just before junior
high and one in junior high—it was a terrible shock to come
from Stanford to here. From Middletown [Connecticut] to
Stanford was a step up both in intellectual quality of the
schooling and in the easy middle-class socialization. It was
easy, it was a suburb with high quality public schools.

When we came here it was Willard Junior High [on Telegraph
Avenue in Berkeley]. It turned out to be a terrible school for
our children, psychologically, and it wasn't so easy with high
school either. I've often felt my children paid a big price
for my job. Then very soon on top of it came the whole culture
shift. That was also a price some of our children paid for my
wanting to come here. That's another story.

In any case, my wife certainly came cheerfully, and we had
--again the reception from the people in and out of the History
Department was just wonderful. It was just so natural. It
wasn't because we were special, it was just naturally the way
they behaved. The Brentanos [Robert and Carroll] found a real
estate agent who was interested in architecture. I was just
getting interested in architecture. He knew this town of
Berkeley like the palm of his hand, and before we ever looked
at anything, he told us about where the possibilities were in
architectural terms—what kind of a little enclave we wanted to
live in. He told us who the leading architects of Berkeley
were and what they had done (a few I knew but most I didn't).
He was a knowledgeable, nice, wonderful man.

Very quickly we were taken in. I think everybody who came
to Berkeley had this experience. That was something I hadn't
undergone and certainly not at Harvard, the university I knew
best. They would put on a big show if you were invited, but it
was formal, it was dinner parties. This was personal. This
was individual people who wanted to make you at home, and they
did.

Lage: And was your wife swept into a social circle?

Schorske: Oh, yes, definitely. That was easy, too, very easy. Then we
had friends or attachments through people— the Bouwsmas— we
hadn't really known them, but very quickly--. Martin Malia,
too, became a good friend. He was a Catholic, my wife is a
Catholic. Sontag was, too. At Wesleyan she was very much odd
man out. In those days Jews had already gotten into
universities, but for Catholics it was very difficult.

Lage: You mean for Catholics to be accepted into academic life?

Schorske: Into academic life, especially in the eastern private schools.
They were Protestant establishments, and the Protestants had
become tolerant toward Jews, but they found Catholics very hard
to take, traditionally. Their tolerance for Catholics
developed later because there was something deeply creedal and
institutional that was offensive to the Protestant
consciousness. It produced, especially in liberal academic
intellectuals, a deep intolerance.

Lage: That's very interesting. I don't remember having that

discussed as much as, say, resistance to the Jewish entry into
academic life.

Schorske: No, it wasn't, but we went through it at Wesleyan, and I saw

the anti-Catholic prejudice strongly at work at Harvard in the
1930s. Well, I won't spend my time on Wesleyan, but it was a
problem. Jews had already been admitted to the faculty even
before the war. After the war it was totally easy. Actually,
Hitler's horror in a way really did absolutely in the end wipe
out anti-Semitism in the American academic establishment and in
general in the country. It was a huge turn.

That same thing did not apply to Catholics. You must
remember that Catholics also were seen as belonging to a rigid,
doctrinal religion. You might be a Catholic mathematician and
be reliable, but if you were a historian it was Just as bad as
being a Communist, for if you were Catholic you were a prisoner
of doctrine; the pope could tell you what to think, you know,
and how to behave. I mean, I exaggerate slightly, but it was a
problem, a real problem.

Lage: But your wife didn't encounter that here.

Schorske: No, and at Wesleyan as soon as the personal element came into
play, Wesleyan was a wonderful place. She had never had any
friendship problems or anything, but it was easier here at the
beginning. The Brentanos were Catholic too. In California it
made very little difference. We found that out in the year we
were at the Center [at Stanford]. It was already clear. Even
the relations between the clergy, the Catholic and the
Protestant clergy, were so much better in California than in
New York or Massachusetts or any of those places where they
were terrible, holding each other at arm's length.

Lage: More Vatican II-ism?

Schorske: Before Vatican II. I mean these distances between the two
faiths was so great before Vatican II and the ecumenical

movement started by the Protestants. Well, that's enough of
that.

Entering the Intellectual Life of the Campus: The Arts Club and
Other Interdisciplinary Connections

Lage: Shall we move on to how you entered into the life of the
campus?

Schorske: Yes, if you like, yes. I would say there were a couple of

points of entry for me. One of them was certainly intellectual
because I rapidly discovered — and always felt it ever after--
the intellectual as well as social welcome mat of Berkeley. I
don't know if it's still characteristic, but I really did think
it was there. You didn't have to prove yourself, you didn't
have to do anything. You were Just assumed to be here, so
people were just naturally open.

I found Henry Smith at a new level of intellectual
engagement, and also in the English department, Mark Schorer,
whom I had also known in Cambridge before the war slightly. I
got to know him better, of course, here. Chuck Muscatine, Tom
Parkinson--! mean, these were all well-established people in
English. That was easy. Some of them belonged to something
called the Arts Club; it's still going in Berkeley, 1 hope.

Lage: Now tell me what that is.

Schorske: The Arts Club was founded before World War 11 to introduce the
arts, the creative arts, into the university. All over the
nation a fight had to be fought to make the universities what
they are today, really committed to the creative arts. They
are training grounds in the arts to some extent. Certainly
they have programs in creative writing, in painting and things
like that, not just in art history or literary history, but
doing it.

Lage: Just as an aside I'll tell you that the art practice program at
Berkeley now is very much threatened to the point of near
extinction, 1 understand.

Schorske: Well, you know that that's also true in public schools at much
lower levels, sometimes disastrously, like in New York where
art is one of the great avenues of advancement for people of
color and immigrants who are good at the visual arts and at
music. We had special high schools in New York for this, not

to mention kindergarten programs and God knows what all. The
last to come on board is the first to be thrown overboard, and
that's what's happening. I'm horrified to hear that art
programs are threatened in Berkeley. The Arts Club was
originally formed to expose and promote them, did that, and
there were fine people in it.

Lage: Who were the active club members?

Schorske: By the time 1 joined it, the number of members was small, but
they were very active and a real presence. The man who can
tell you most about that, to my knowledge, is Charles
Muscatine. Bill Fretter in the Physics Department was in it,
then there was a wonderful philosopher who is still a friend of
mine, he's at Harvard — Stanley Cavell. He was teaching here,
and in that club. With my son, 1 audited his course in
Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations — an intense and
deeply disturbing intellectual experience.

Joe [Joseph] Kerman, who is very important in my life,
important in the sense that his work—well, Ann, you probably
read him in my course, actually. It was a book of Kerman 's
called Opera as Drama, a marvelous book, sort of opera through
the ages to teach people who are not themselves musically
educated what the relation is between music and theater, plot
and music--it was a terrific book. He's a marvelous scholar,
another one. I was getting interested in putting music into my
own research, so this was important for me.

There was also [T. J.) Kent, who was a city planner here,
and Bill [William] Wurster, who was the dean of the College of
Environmental Design, and Leo Lowenthal in sociology. These
were people—many of them, like the aesthetician Stephen
Pepper, had been years at Berkeley, and they freely took in
newer or younger people. In any case, there I met the whole
interdisciplinary crowd. We had agreeable dinners, and we read
papers to each other, giving us all feedback.

Lage: So this was related to the research you were doing.

Schorske: Much of it was, but more: it was related to my whole

intellectual life, my teaching, too. My teaching did involve
more media than the printed word, especially as I got deeper
into the nineteenth century. My historical mission became,
then, introducing the arts as a constituent of history- -not
simply as an illustration of a history which is essentially
political by tradition, but as a constituent in socio-cultural
history. The people I met in the faculty outside the history

department made a wider, humanistic discourse possible. I had
it at Wesleyan, where I had a lot of very good colleagues, but
here there were many more of them, and it was so easy to open
the network into the German department, for example, where I
got, you might say, tutoring in Austrian literature from Heinz
Politzer or people in architecture who could really tell me new
things .

Lage: Did you do that more than most historians, do you think?

Schorske: Yes, but that's because my problems were interdisciplinary. It
was also because I had good connections here in the first
place. I hate to say it, but so much in academic life is
dependent on connections. It's just as bad as in the corporate
empires. "Who do you know?" These faculty people, very like-
minded to myself, could open new vistas and in a way lead me to
the intellectual resources of the university, to have converse
and socializing with its people. So it was partly my interest,
but I have to say it's more entering into a congenial
community. Nobody planned it, nobody on either end was
planning anything, but the structure of the place was porous
and welcoming. If you put those two things together, and add
my need for interdisciplinary conversation in my work, that
became important.

The Postwar Generation's Interest in Intellectual History

Schorske: The other thing of importance to my scholarship was the

Department of History itself. I somewhat disagree with Gene
Brucker's picture of its character. He separates the
generations: the pure political narrative historians from the
social historians. At one level he's right, but the big wave
of the generation I belong to, just slightly older than Gene's,
five to fifteen years older—start ticking it off: Henry May,
Martin Malia, Joe Levenson in Asian History, who was a
marvelous man, Bill Bouwsma, Nick Riasanovsky--all these people
were intellectual historians. It was a kind of a wave of
intellectual history that swept the American historical
profession in the forties and fifties. It isn't that we
couldn't teach something else, but our commitment was very much
in that vein.

Lage: I think he was talking about the generation before you as being
more focused on political history. I'm surprised that Sontag
was teaching intellectual history.

Schorske: And he did it for modern Europe as a whole, but with great

discomfort. He did it because he thought it was a field that
needed doing, now high on the profession's agenda, and the fact
that people like all those I've mentioned were coming along.
The talent in history, which very soon went to social history,
at that time was going into intellectual history. Ray felt the
need for American students to be exposed to modern intellectual
history even though he was not an expert in it. He offered the
course in the way that in my time I've taught Greek history- -we
do the things we sometimes do because an institution has a
lack, and you do the best you can. He didn't want to do that
forever; he wanted the position filled, and so did the
department .

So they hired a whole bunch of people. Tom Kuhn, the
historian of science, was another who became a real good
friend. That was a new tendency in the earliest postwar
generation; we flocked to intellectual history. It became a
really live and active field. It was still happily wedded to
social history, not the intense archival social history that,
say, Gene Brucker did, which is a very special kind.
Nevertheless, we had a lot of that too. The American
progressive tradition combined social and intellectual history
in a way that I still regard as--you know, that's where I live.
Social history and intellectual history both have gone in
other, autonomous directions, but we could talk about that some
other time.

Intradepartmental Politics; Thomas Kuhn. Carl Bridenbaugh,
Raymond Sontag

Lage: Would you have more to say about Tom Kuhn? He does come up
quite a bit--you'll see when you see the videotape from the
meeting [history department colloquium on the history of the
Department of History] that he's talked about.

Schorske: Yes, well, I'm sure that he's talked about. On the one hand,
we all recognized that this was a very first-class guy. I
don't think anybody had the idea that he was the world-class
scholar which he is now recognized to have been. There are
some historical reasons for this recognition that has come to
him in the last twenty years. Among us faculty people in
history, he certainly was thought to be first-class.

There were a lot of departmental troubles that revolved
around him. There were a lot of troubles for Tom that revolved

around his attempt, a valiant attempt, to be both a historian
and a philosopher of science. In the end, he had to be content
to be labeled a historian of science, though in his very last
years, he had turned more and more to philosophy and had
developed that.

In the philosophy department here he had, by his own
account, real foes. I'm not knowledgeable about all those
quarrels. We in history tended to support him, but then we had
a big crisis about—that you probably have been told about--
about his promotion to full professor, I think it was to full.
He already was associate, I think; I'm not sure. It was the
thing that led in the end to Carl Bridenbaugh's resignation
because Bridenbaugh didn't think he should have that job.

Lage: Tell me what to recall about that.

Schorske: Well, that was true. In any case, there was a complicated
reason for that. Bridenbaugh had his own candidate, Hunter
Dupree, a competent man, too, but Bridenbaugh faced in Kuhn
supporters a very solid phalanx of the people who had been his
ally in so many things in the earlier quarrels, most of which
were over by the time I got here. In any case, he was a
disappointed man that Tom was promoted over his negative
assessment.

Lage: Yet history would certainly vindicate that decision.

Schorske: It certainly would, and it is not in denigration of Dupree, who
also had a professorship here but could not compete with Kuhn
in sheer intellectual brilliance. Who among us could?

I'm not going to go into the politics because partly I
distrust my memory of the department's politics even more than
elsewhere. All of this is tricky. I like it better when you
can go back and forth to documents and correct yourself. In
any case, Hunter Dupree has had a good career as a historian of
American science. In the end, both left: Bridenbaugh in 1962,
Dupree in 1968. They went to Brown along with Bryce Lyon
(1965] and Perry Curtis [1975]. Bridenbaugh went first and
brought the others after him. I think that's the way it went.'

2 For more on this incident, see oral history with Kenneth Stampp in
this series, and David Bellinger's "Afterword" in History at Berkeley; A
Dialogue in Three Parts (Berkeley: Center for Studies in Higher Education,
UC Berkeley, 1998).

Lage: Then shortly after Bridenbaugh left, he made that kind of
amazing presidential address to the American Historical
Association.

Schorske: Oh, he did that after he left? That was a horror, yes, I
remember that, I remember it vividly. It was an attack on
Oscar Handlin, but in a form which suggested that children of
recent immigrants lacked the sensibility to write American
history.

Schorske: 1 can only say that in all these things, intradepartmental

fights are like family fights. It's very difficult to control
the ill effects of these fights. Bitternesses arise which turn
judgments sour. This is a grave difficulty. Bridenbaugh was
never my kind of historian. I learned from his kind of
history, and I respected what he did. I never liked him much
as a person. That was the way it was. I know he was a very
valuable member of the department and did a lot of good work.

In the end, the people then who became disappointed in his
behavior over Kuhn would begin to see that he was flawed in
other ways. When he made that terrible speech in the AHA, it
was like a vindication of the bad opinion that was formed of
him by people who could not accept his view on something else.
So you get a general drop in his reputation that perhaps went
too far. I don't know.

Unlike many of my colleagues I was attached to Sontag as a
person. On national politics we disagreed basically; there we
had very little in common, very little. I knew that he was a
wonderful teacher, and he did things in the department nobody
else did. One of them was to foster connections with the
Pacific Coast Historical Association. Now this may have
changed, but he was a vigorous protagonist of that
organization. Maybe a year after I came--no, it could even
have been before—on his invitation I went to one of these
conferences. It was in Utah. There I met people who would not
have had the money to go to the national conventions. They
could only get this far. They could only go where they could
sleep in dormitories on the cheap because they were in small,
bad-paying little colleges scattered all up and down the West
Coast and on into the mountain country.

The importance of this meeting for those people was huge.
They were drinking at the professional font of history, and
therefore the responsibility of people who had connections with
the national or international guild seemed to be enormously

Lage:

important. Sontag took that responsibility very seriously and
tried to enlist people in that enterprise. That's the kind of
citizenship you don't find very often because most university
people say, "Why do I want to go to meet the guys from Slippery
Rock State Teachers College? That isn't where I live, that
isn't where 1 move." He had that service orientation—he was
the same way towards students.

I know he played favorites among students. But he rescued
people for intellectual life that would have gone down the
drain if he hadn't put the investment in. He had these
admirable qualities as a person. Okay, so his politics-
including his departmental politics which then became very
suspect and distrusted because he belonged to the old guard
that Gene Brucker describes in his lecture, he was a leader of
it. I felt, well, okay, so he has his flaws maybe, but don't
exaggerate to the point where you lose the huge services that
this man is doing for history as a profession, as a constituent
in the communal life of the country. He's doing something for
it.

He was another wonderful lecturer who attracted students into
the discipline of history.

Schorske: Indeed he was, terrific.

I'm a profiteer from his generosity, which of course
contributes to my positive attitude. I told you about the two
people who were his assistants when I came to this university,
James Sheehan and Peter Loewenberg. The next year, when I
joined the faculty, the first thing he did was, he persuaded
these two guys to leave him. They were going to write their
theses with him. He was the man in German intellectual
history—they were working in German history. He persuaded
them to sign up with me. In other words, he gave me two of his
very best Ph.D. candidates. I always felt it was a welcoming
present. He never said anything about it, but I knew that that
was what was going on.

A Vocational Mission and a Humanistic View of History

Lage: This takes us a little off track, but was the opportunity to

work with graduate students another thing that you appreciated?

Schorske: Well, I had to learn that slowly. I didn't appreciate it in
principle. I felt very strongly, and it's one of the reasons

that I favored undergraduate work in my own vocation for so
long, I felt that you really formed people in terms of their
intellectual outlook when they were undergraduates. You have
the most impact in opening them to possibilities in the pre-
professional moment. When they are grad students, and you are
taking them on as serious professionals, your first duty is to
equip them with the tools of the craft--teach them clear
thinking, rigorous methods, the arts of demonstration, and, if
possible, encourage their imaginative initiative.

Fundamentally, the graduate student is somebody who has
already made a kind of choice for himself, and he has the
parameters of his intellectual categories fairly well-defined.
So I was a little leery about being a graduate teacher. In the
end, of course, 1 came to love it, and at the end of my career
at Princeton, I was a really good graduate trainer, better I
think than I had been at Berkeley, though 1 had marvelous
students here. I enjoyed the students, but I don't think it
was my real mission. My real mission was more as an
undergraduate teacher, and I think I had that in common with
Sontag, probably, more than with most other colleagues in the
department.

Professionalization, as was correctly observed by Brucker
in his excellent lecture: that was the name of the game. So
saying, "What are the newest methods?"--that was the way most
people introduced students to historiography. I always taught
it as historiography, not as a historical methods class, not
as, "What is going on in the game today?" It was always, "What
are the large views of history, how have they evolved in
relation to the historical context in which those historians
conceived their mission and wrote their books?" I was making a
history out of history, not dealing so much with the methods
and the latest cutting edge of the discipline, but going back
in time to see how the nature and function of history as
thought evolved in relation to history as actuality.

Woodrow Borah and I were at opposite ends of this, and I
respected him a lot. He was a real methodologist , but he and I
for a while—we each had a section of the graduate
historiography course. Everybody could do it their own way,
and many people have done it since in various ways, I'm sure-
he was much more interested in the latest developments in
historical thought and methods, and I was much more interested
in the evolution of the idea of history and what historical
works showed about culture and society.

It's just a different point of view. Partly it's the
difference between a social scientist and a humanist. History

lies between. Some of us lean more to the one, some to the other.
The best of us can do both, but very few are the best of us. So,
those are the poles.

Lage: You put yourself more towards the humanist?

Schorske: I would be more on the humanist side, yes. I used to be more on
the social science side, but when social science began to go
behaviori'.st and used natural scientific models, I began to
withdraw from that form. I would have been fully on board with,
let's say, Gene Brucker's kind of history, social history, but I
wouldn't have been with other forms, such as quantitative history
and things like that. Woodrow Borah was into that with great
results.

Lage: You talked a little bit about factions in the department. Is

there more to say there, how it broke down? Was there more than
politics that made the factions?

Schorske: Yes, I would say--let's put it this way. On the whole, I felt
that the intensity of factional feeling was kept under control.
There were crucial decisions about tenure appointments where it
would necessarily surface. The problem was the aftermath of those
decisions, so that one side would consider the other to be
manipulative and so on.

Lage: Would they surface over, What kind of history do we want here at
Berkeley? Or, Is this radical coming into our department?

Schorske: I know of only one case, that of Richard Drinnon, where a

political radical was denied tenure [ 1959-1960] .' I think that
that case could be--and was—decided in terms other than the
candidate's radicalism. One of the problems with anybody who is a
deviant, whether they're politically radical or whatever they are,
is that there are people who would make the decision because of
the deviance but who would justify it in terms of scholarly or
teaching inadequacy. That's one way. The opposite is equally
true. There are people who would be so partisan that they would
overvalue a candidate's scholarly accomplishments- -you know.
Anyway, the thing is that politics enters the equation, but in my
opinion, the department didn't succumb to that type of thing,
either in this case or in any other that I recall.

God knows when I came I already had a record as a radical
because I worked for Henry Wallace. Kenneth Stampp was appointed
in this department; he had a similar record. Most importantly,
after I left the department overwhelmingly supported Reginald
Zelnik for tenure when, I believe, there was opposition to him

3 See the oral history with Kenneth Stampp in this series for a fuller
account of this incident.

at the regental level for his identification with the New Left
students.

Involvement in Civil Libertarian Issues

Lage:
Schorske :

Lage:
Schorske:

Tell me about your background because we've got to pick up on
your own political views.

Well, okay, I mean my background--f irstly, as I said, I was a
Wallace supporter, serving on the Connecticut state board of
that movement. In the thirties I had been a left-wing
isolationist, never a communist, but an isolationist--! sent
you that little biography—because as a child of German
extraction the experience of World War was burned into my
childhood consciousness. [See Appendix A) My father was both
a banker and a socialist, a very odd combination. I had the
deepest suspicion of world politics and also, therefore,
tremendous interest in it. I had left-wing proclivities but
then mixed them very oddly with pacifism. (This is still true,
although there is no left to go to anymore.)

Ken Stampp had this similar background,
banker, but he was a German.

His father wasn't a

He was a Wisconsin German, that's right; I hadn't ever put this
together, of course you're right.

His father didn't come from an elite cultural or social group.

My father didn't come from an elite group, but he moved into
it. He was not college educated. The fact is that he was a
19th century type, an autodidact of great intellectual
acquirement. Anyhow, Ren and 1 had some similar experience

except Ken also came from a Lutheran background,
right about that.

I think I'm

It's Protestant, but I don't think it was Lutheran.

It's Protestant, maybe not Lutheran. He came of a very hard
moralistic school, and I was not trained that way. My parents
were much more modulated. My father was an atheist, but my
mother was Jewish, he was gentile. They didn't--how shall I
put it?--they did not inculcate moral rigidities. They were
more flexible, perhaps more aesthetic. That sometimes
modulates—morals and aesthetics don't necessarily go hand in

hand, they can go at cross purposes sometimes,
know how we got off on this .

Anyway, I don't

Lage: This is why one thing leads to another. We were talking about
the makeup of the department, the political factions, and I
wanted to get your political background as well.

Schorske: My political background was that; plus, of course, in the

McCarthy period, like every just plain liberal, if you were a
serious liberal, thtn you had to get into the business of the
defense of communism, in a certain sense—not communism itself,
but of Communists whose freedom of speech and even livelihood
were being arbitrarily threatened or withdrawn.

One of my first political involvements, thanks to Ken
Stampp and Henry Smith, was with the ACLU activities. I don't
remember whether I was a member of ACLU or not, but I can tell
you that they got into one issue after another, the same group
of people. I was astonished to find in my documents how far
back the group with whom I became associated in the FSM crisis
had been working together on other free speech questions from
way back--1961 and probably before.

Lage: The academic freedom and....

Schorske: There was Slate, I don't know if you know about the banning of
Slate. That was the first one I was involved with. I never
had done this stump speaking. I think Kenneth got me involved
in that.

Lage: And did you do stump speaking?

Schorske: I remember only one occasion. In those days our Hyde Park was
not on Sproul steps. There was an oak—beautifully planted
inside Sather Gate, near Wheeler Hall— an oak, I hope it still
stands, in a kind of concrete planter. That was a place where
you'd get up and make speeches at lunchtime. So I remember
giving a speech at lunch. In fact, there was more to it than
that.

Political Tolerance within the History Department, the Nature
of the Discipline

Schorske: Now you were talking about the department, though. I never
felt the splits in the department deeply. We could have
disagreements about politics, but on the whole I don't think of

the department as ever factionalized by politics, even if there
was the case I mentioned of the American historian, Richard
Drinnon, who is the biographer of Emma Goldman, who was denied
tenure. There was a division—some of the people may have
voted just because of his politics. He was a leader in the
movement against capital punishment, revolving around the
Chessman case. I wasn't personally involved in that.

Lage: I think Ken Stampp discussed hin, too.
Schorske: Ken was close to him.

Lage: And there was some question as to whether he was academically
up to snuff, also.

Schorske: Yes, there was. Did Ken raise it that way?
Lage: Yes.

Schorske: 1 think Ken favored his appointment, that was my recollection,
but he would give you the right answer on that. He was most
favorable to him partly because they were such close political
colleagues. I wasn't that close to him personally, but I liked
him very much.

Anyway, the long and short, I think that was the only case
where even a suspicion could be aroused that there was
political prejudice as a factor in professional decisions.
When I came along, nobody raised it about me, I'm sure. Henry
May knew all about my political past such as it was, and other
people, Henry Smith—all the people at Harvard knew that I had
been active in the interventionist-isolationist debate, that 1
was a leftist of sorts. I never felt any prejudice in the
department about politics any more than I felt it about being
Jewish. I don't think the department really acted that way.

Lage: It wasn't an issue on departmental, professional matters?

Schorske: No, no. I can tell you— I've said it a million times with deep
satisfaction. The terrific experience of the departmental
ethos was during the FSM when political splits developed that
were on-campus issues but with national resonance. Even then,
it was a matter of great pride to me, and I'm sure to people
who were miles away from me politically, that the History
Department provided leadership for a variety of group positions
on the spectrum of campus politics. Yet the same people who
were opponents on the senate floor would divide differently
over the decisions about history in the department— on
appointments, promotions, departmental policy, hiring,

committees, anything. Campus political orientations would be
put aside in department meetings; you would be there because
you were a group of professionals committed to your own subject
and your department.

Lage: Do you have an explanation for that because it wasn't true in
all departments — sociology and—

Schorske: I have an explanation, 1 have a very simple, primitive

explanation. History is a very ancient discipline. History
can ill-afford, and every decade shows it more, to assume that
it will ever create a full consensus of historical
understanding. It isn't possible. Look, we're not as old as
Methuselah, we're not as old as the Jewish race, but we are old
enough to have known that people who fervently believed in the
truth of one set of meanings in history have been superseded
again and again by people with totally different ideas. The
"cutting edge" is suspect in history because we know from
experience that it will soon prove ephemeral. It too will
vanish. You know, when you get to be older, you realize that
you, too, have vanished--! mean that your works will die—or,
at best, will be absorbed into the stream of historical
thought. The work that one day is the rage, the next day it's
old hat. Historians are, I think, much more aware of
transience than social scientists. That's the way it is.

I feel that the historian's skeptical sensibility has
tended to make them more catholic. Their judgements about
people in the profession should not be derived from the
opinions they hold, the faith they are committed to, the
politics they pursue or things of that sort, for they do not
constitute a good basis for professional judgement. It's too
uncertain. If a person looks as though he's got a great faith
or general idea, and he's interpreting history by means of it,
just because you don't share the great idea, that doesn't mean
he isn't doing something really creative and important in his
historical work. Fine history can be written with ideas and
values we may not share. Look at Thucydides or Ranke!

Lage: Why doesn't a discipline like sociology share this?

Schorske: That's the second point. It often does, but its belief in
itself as a science causes difficulties. I've been very
involved in this quite lately because I've been running the
project in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a history
of the development of academic culture since World War II, the
last fifty years. We've only studied four disciplines (history
is not one of them). We didn't take sociology either; we took
political science.

I can tell you that there is one theme that comes up in the
fifties: the use of the scientific model. If you look at the
political science department in the crisis of FSM, and the
campus upheaval, it is split, and so is sociology, to a large
degree on the lines of methodological commitment. The people
who are working firmly within the scientific model are on the
right side of the political spectrum. The people who are
either descriptive of social inequities, social suffering and
so on, where you've already got the intrusion of some kind of
ethical norm into the definition of the scholarly problem,
those people are likely to be on the left of the spectrum. In
sociology, it certainly worked that way.

Kingsley Davis in sociology, a master of demographic
sociology; Charles Clock, who did survey research—these men
brought new statistical power to their discipline. They were
very conservative people in campus affairs. I've never figured
out this whole taxonomy psychologically. There are different
reasons for different groups, surely there must be, but in
political science, too, the correspondence between attitude in
campus politics and scholarly method was palpable.

Lage: They are still a very split department from what I understand.

Schorske: The people who committed themselves to the scientific method at
the moment when it became the thing—the behavioralists in
political science — assumed responsibility for a certain
predictive capacity. They became very suspicious of
traditional political philosophy and the intrusion of its
normative externalities into the business of scientific
hypothesis formation and testing.

The problem with testing is it's always based on regularity
and repetition. If something comes along, like the nineteen-
sixties cultural revolution— which nobody expected, nobody
could have anticipated, this explosion; or the race problem--
with a scientific predictive mechanism, you couldn't do that
because you're always working with the existing reality. Hence
the future is a closed book to you except insofar as you think
you can extrapolate. A new situation challenges your very
method, your scientific ego.

Lage: The 1960s may have thrown them more, then.

Schorske: It threw them more. I think it really threw them more,

throughout the country, not just in Berkeley. When I look at
the Aaron Wildavskys and others, who were that side of
political science at Berkeley, they were the people who felt
most outraged by the student movement.

Now there was another group that was very close always to
governmental policy—Paul Seabury, Robert Scalapino, etc. --it
was also on the right in the university crisis and on the
Vietnam War. They were descriptive in their approach to
politics. It was the [Sheldon] Wolins, Hanna Pitkin, [John]
Schaar--it was a cluster of people, actually they came to
center around Wolin--who were in the tradition of philosophical
political theory. Schaar was an Emersonian. Wolin was a
mixture of classical and Old Testament scholarship with the
great books of political science — from Plato to Tocqueville and
Hannah Arendt. He became a very close friend of mine and a
collaborator on the left in the university crisis.

Anyway, those divisions in method that reenforced the
political split we never had in history; and I always felt that
made life possible. One could go back to the history
department feeling reasonably happy about the way intellectual
respect and humility blunted the cruel edges of political
division.

Lage: So you think it's the nature of history more than the social
relationships and the culture of the department?

Schorske: I don't want to say that it's "more than," but that it is a

factor I would certainly say, and it is not often noticed. As
I remember it, in the chemistry department there was one
person—there was one person who was on the left, he was all
alone. Although everybody liked him.

Physics wasn't so, it was split. There are different kinds
of physicists, and I don't know how much a taxonomy of
methodological analysis could be co-related with a taxonomy of
political attitude there.

Lage: Maybe theoretical versus experimental physicists.

Schorske: I do not know. I really don't know enough about it. 1 can

think of a few examples that would lead one to that view, but
that would take more looking. As you say, social factors enter
in. What place does the department have in the university
councils? Does it have a strong ego or a weak ego as a
consequence? Where is it in the national roster? That can
also affect people's conservatism or radicalism.

Lage: What I'm also thinking, Just very much more simply— what kind
of social interaction is there between the members? The
development of friendships, the kind of thing you've described.

Schorske: Yes, well, 1 think that's important. I've often felt that
scientists are marvelous at that. Maybe I'm wrong or have
romanticized them. I've seen them also as models in teaching.
The science student in the laboratory with his professor--!
know that sometimes the professors don't give credit to science
students who have made key interventions and helped their work,
have even been the originator of an idea or something--
nevertheless, basically scientists work with their students
with an admirable intensity, treating them as their equals in
the same operation—coffee together, bag lunches for reading
papers of graduate students to faculty and vice versa, and
questioning weekly visitors in common. There's an esprit de
corps that's terrific — and lacking in history graduate
education as I have known it.

When I was at Berkeley, one of the things I hoped for was
that we could generate that particular dimension of science
education, the socialization around the intellectual life, that
we could make that more widespread. My attempts, centering on
the creation of a group in intellectual or cultural history,
were inadequate in this direction and were rejected by the
department. I'm trying to say that whatever the intellectual
divisions among scientists, they did not seem to interfere with
the socially organized intellectual life, that social
networking was very strong in a positive way. In some
departments that may have made them look uniform; in others it
may have led to splits. I don't know what those correlations
are. Speculation in this area is not enough. Real research is
needed.

Lage: All food for thought. It's an interesting project you're doing
there, on the development of academic culture. Is David
Hollinger [professor of history at UC Berkeley] involved in
that?

Schorske: Yes, he is. The study compared the intellectual development of
four disciplines since World War II, in three temporal phases.
David wrote a paper on that period since 1980. I did one on
the period 1945-1960, when the scientific model acquired an
unprecedented salience in the social sciences and philosophy.*

* Thomas Bender and Carl Schorske (editors) American Academic Culture
in Transformation. Fifty Years. Four Disciplines (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1997).

II FREE SPEECH ISSUES AT BERKELEY

Appointed Chair of the Department, 1962

Lage: Let's turn to your chairmanship of the history department, and
then go back and pick up the McCarthyism/f ree speech types of
things and end at FSM [Free Speech Movement]. How does that
sound?

Schorske: We could do that.

Lage: You became chairman of the history department in '62, a mere
two years after you came to Berkeley.

Schorske: Yes.

Lage: And that, I think is something of note: that you would be
chosen as chair so soon.

Schorske: Well, it may be. Some of my colleagues probably knew of my
wartime administrative experience. Maybe I was seen as
somebody who had the confidence of factions still at war with
each other or distrustful of each other. It's the trust
problem that's always basic for these things. But above all,
it was Berkeley's amazing openness to the newcomer, of which I
spoke above, that made my appointment possible.

Lage: Is the chairman chosen by his peers, or by the dean?

Schorske: Chosen by the dean, but the peers are consulted in depth. I

don't know exactly what the procedure was then or now, but the
normal thing is that the department members are expected to
write their recommendations, and whether they do it directly to
the dean or through the chairman, I don't remember at all, but
certainly the dean would canvass very carefully, not only by

Lage:
Schorske:

letters, but also by interviewing people he thought it was
worth talking to—especially if it's a troubled department.
Sometimes he knows the department well, sometimes he doesn't
know it at all. We had a dean who was very well disposed to
history.

That must have been Lincoln Constance [dean of the College of
Letters and Science, 1955-1962).

Lincoln Constance, that's it. He knew us well and handled the
divisions tactfully. I would say Sontag was the leading
surviving "old guard" person, but Bridenbaugh as senior leader
of the younger faction had more power. But Professor Guttridge
was also a very sage senior member. I was on good terms with
Sontag and Stampp, and May's my oldest friend here. All were
close to Lincoln Constance, I believe; maybe also to Bill
Fretter [associate dean], I don't know. I was in the Arts Club
with Bill Fretter, so he might have known me from that. It's
very hard to know--

All these networks.

It isn't even terribly important,
to a sudden operation.

My term was very short, due

Organizing a Historians' Petition on the Bay of Pigs

Schorske: When Kennedy came in, I was like most academics very high on
his advent, and I talked enthusiastically about it on a radio
station in Oakland, I remember. But then came the Bay of Pigs.

Lage: You talked on the Oakland station about what?

Schorske: On the inaugural speech of Kennedy. It was two historians; the
other was a friend of mine from Dominican College, Marshall
Dill.

Lage: Commentators?

Schorske: Right, amateur commentators, exactly. Very quickly after that
came the Bay of Pigs, very shortly. Then I did organize a
national historians' petition against the Bay of Pigs, to put
a big ad in the New York Times and other papers. We soon found
out the place to get our views across was through foreign
papers, because in the United States, academic intellectuals
couldn't get news stories on this, you'd have to pay for it

Lage:
Schorske:

all. But foreigners would pick it up when historians in
numbers launched a protest.

What the intellectuals thought was important in foreign
countries wasn't important here, and it was a much better
avenue abroad because here people were so still in the anti-
communist vein that the Bay of Pigs didn't look bad until quite
a lot later. It looked bad abroad more quickly because it was
the United States that was doing it and not they. We learned
that it was easier to get pressure on our own government
indirectly from abroad than it was to exercise it at home.

How interesting.

In any case, I remember having a coffee with Nick Riasanovsky
in the little canteen in Dwinelle about the day after the Bay
of Pigs happened, and how concerned we both were. A number of
historians participated in this effort here. We mobilized our
colleagues around the country for a statement—no big deal.

Protesting University Policies on Slate and the Use of the
University Name

Schorske: There were always running issues at Berkeley, administrative
harassment of political expression. Thus the suspension of
Slate. Then came the matter about the university name; we had
a crisis about the use of the university name.

Lage: About the university name?

Schorske: Yes. Faculty members were not supposed to identify themselves
as being faculty members of the University of California when
they engaged in political causes. We regarded that as anybody
would all over the country, we were here. If you were the
president of a corporation, no reason you shouldn't say that
you're with Latex, or whatever it is, when you express your
views .

Lage: Right, you're not speaking for the institution.
Schorske: No. So, we didn't accept that restriction.
Lage: And that was during your chairmanship?

Schorske :

Lage:
Schorske :

Lage:
Schorske ;

Lage:
Schorske:

No that was before [Spring 1962). But here already in this
Slate case—this is so interesting—this is a long memorandum
which we did —

That was in '61?

August 23, '61. This is a memorandum to President Kerr and
Chancellor Strong [about the suspension of the student
political organization, Slate]. 1 don't think I was chairman
then.

No, that was the year before.

I can give you this document [see Appendix B), but what I
wanted to point out to you is that the people who were involved
in this [memorandum defending student political rights] --all of
the people whose names appear here as signatories, were the
faculty later on involved in drafting the faculty's December 8
resolution in the Free Speech crisis. We were the civil-
libertarian left-wing of the faculty that did that.

The continuity came as a total surprise to me when I found
it in my papers now! This is August '61, but already people
are only talking about Slate because they were civil
libertarian; Van Kennedy (one of the signatories) was a leading
civil libertarian on campus. I can't remember whether he was a
political scientist or a lawyer--! can't remember. Hanan
Selvin, I think, was a sociologist. I don't know where his
politics evolved. But the fact is these people-
Henry Nash Smith, Philip Selznick, Leo Lowenthal—

Leo Lowenthal recently died,
department .

Charles Sellers.

He too was in the sociology

Charles Sellers, and Kenneth Stampp. So three of these eight
people who took this initiative were in the history department,
and there might have more.

Now we're getting into the roots of the Free Speech Movement.

Well we are, but it's also partly about the Department of
History because the Aptheker case was centered in it.

I have to simply say: to my surprise—it belongs somewhere
in the center of the story— long before the students were
activists in these matters, the faculty was activated; but it

Lage:

Schorske:

was the civil libertarians in the faculty that were activated.
They were, in certain sense, the forerunners trying to get the
policies changed in the university in order to overcome the
liabilities that clung on from the past, including the oath,
but reaching farther back.

Those policies were depriving people on the campus of the
right of political expression. So, it goes back to '61, and
even the use of the university name. There's another document
that is just indicative of the temper of the time.

Would something like your taking out an ad relative to the Bay
of Pigs--would you not be allowed to identify yourself?

No, if I had signed, and I probably did. Nobody challenged my
right to sign it directly, but identification definitely would
have been covered by this policy; you would not be allowed to
do that.

Lage: Do you know who George was here [signature on a memo regarding
the use of the university name]? [See Appendix C)

Schorske: George Stocking, he's a professor of history. I was on the
search committee when he was hired. He is at Chicago now in
history and anthropology, a very distinguished man.

Sponsoring an Off -Campus Colloquium with Herbert Aptheker,
March 1963

Schorske: Now, here's the Aptheker case, and that to me is--do you want
that?

Lage: Definitely.

Schorske: The Aptheker matter--! was department chairman when that

happened, and I will give you these documents. Do you know the
outlines of the Aptheker case? I could tell, if you want, my
remembrance of this story.

We invited Herbert Aptheker as a History Club lecturer--
that's described here [See Appendix D]--who was one of the
earliest historians of the blacks. Kenneth Stampp can situate
him exactly historiographically; I can't. He was not a man of
genius by any means. He was a professed Communist and an
editor of one of their periodicals, and he wrote a Marxist
history of the Negro, but he was also a pioneer in history

doing that subject; people simply didn't do it. Ken was
another pioneer later. Anyway, he was invited to the campus.
1 don't think we invited him because he was a Communist, but
maybe- -

Lage: You don't think you saw it as a test case?

Schorske: I don't think so originally, but it could be that we did: that
it was a piece of, you might say, testing the rules, or
malicious mischief, if you wish.

Lage: It's not so malicious.

Schorske: Well, whatever; but it could have been something like that. I
cannot guarantee that some civil libertarian motive like that
wasn't in it. But in any case, we had already had a foreign
Communist speaking. He was a Russian Marxist and a historian,
and we had him at a graduate colloquium with no interdiction
from the administration. This occasion too was only a graduate
colloquium, not a public exercise. We usually let people in if
they wanted to come, but it wasn't something- -

Lage: It wasn't being publicized?

Schorske: No. So we invited Aptheker, and then as we knew, I had to

apply to the administration for permission to pay him, and then
it was denied on grounds that there was a regulation that
forbade Communists to speak. So we then took the lecture off
campus .

Lage: Was it denied by the chancellor's office?

Schorske: It was denied by the chancellor himself. I went to Chancellor
Strong on it, and he denied it--he couldn't help it. He was
bound by the rules.

Lage: Was he at all sympathetic?

Schorske: Well, you will see from my correspondence with him- -yes, in a
way, he was sympathetic. He had not been the worst in the
older days of the oath.

Chancellor Strong. He was a very fine man actually, a very
nice, gentle man, and it was horrible that he was plunged into
the FSM thing later. But he was not a strong man; his name
didn't fit the character. He had convictions, but he didn't
necessarily live by them if higher authority said "No." So I

think he was sympathetic to our action, but he couldn't say
that to me either, and I understood that.

Anyway, the long and short was --Ken Stampp was involved
with this. I think he and I worked the strategy together.
Others may have been involved, possibly Henry May, I don't
know. We decided that we would have him speak off campus and
would pay him ourselves; we would pass the hat. So we did. I
think, in the end, we only paid him forty dollars or something
like that. Of course, in those days, you got fifty dollars for
a lecture at a university.

Lage: That's right, it's more than it sounds like.

Schorske: In any case, we decided to do it. The department voted twenty-
seven to one, with two abstentions--! found the figures — in
favor of this. So solid was the department. This was a
principle. The guy was a bona fide historian, nobody could
deny it, and it was an academic exercise, a graduate
colloquium. He was going to be questioned as speakers are; he
was going to be criticized as speakers are. But it was part of
the educational process, so we were very firm. I don't even
remember any big discussion of pro and con in the department.

Lage: Everyone had recognized this, it seems.

Schorske: Right. That's the kind of thing again, see. That's nitty

gritty basic university; that's the teaching function. What do
you need academic freedom for? This is what's it's all about.
Of course, I was able to report that.

After we held the event in the YMCA, we made an appeal as a
department--! don't know with what vote, because it isn't
recorded in this document — to the Academic Freedom Committee
[of the Academic Senate], that they should now take up the
question of this so-called Rule Five that had prevented us from
inviting Aptheker to the campus. We detailed the history and
the reasons why we thought they really must go after this
question. So there it was—but you see how well it feeds into
FSM?

Lage: Yes.

Schorske: In this case the conflict with the administration was only at
the university teaching level, but very soon it became- -as it
had already started to be with the Slate thing— the students'
right to political organization, which the university was
denying. That's a different question. But they're so closely
related, and the same people who got activated around one would

be activated around the other; but there was a much bigger
community that would be activated around the interference with
academic freedom in its teaching dimension than with the
political citizenship rights of an academic community. That's
a larger question on which divisions can be deeper, and where
the proportions are different. I came to realize the
difference from the Berkeley experience.

Moderating the Appearance of Mickey Lima, First American
Communist to Speak on Campus, July 1963

Lage: Did you find something in your papers relating to Mickey
[Albert J.) Lima's coming to campus?

Schorske: Oh yes, I did indeed. I have a whole bunch of stuff. That was
really odd. It was July of "63. I don't know if I was still
the chairman. It sounds to me like I had my operation in April
or something, and that ended my chairmanship.

Lage: You were chairman in '62 and '63.

Schorske: I don't know how long into '63. It is not stated in any of

these documents on Lima that I was the chairman. My guess is
that I was no longer chair. It was in the summer; it wasn't
even in the school session. It was interesting for me to find
my speech, since I couldn't even remember the episode.

Lage: It was [Professor of History] Irv Scheiner who remembered it
and was telling me about it.

Schorske: There is the speech that I made, and then I got notes, for
example, from Strong.

Lage: Was this held off campus also?
Schorske: No, that was on campus.

Lage: I see; this was the first time a Communist spoke on campus
because the rule was changed?

Schorske: Yes. Well, no, a foreign Communist had talked, but this was
now--

Lage: An American.

Schorske: Right. Of course, there was a ruckus with the Regents, and I
have correspondence with a few people, including a nice note
from Clark Kerr, who then favored letting Communists speak.

Lage: This is wonderful [looking at correspondence).

Schorske: Yes. It's not much, but it's a little. Here's a letter from
Bill Davis, who was the head of Stiles Hall, the YMCA. That
was a refuge, where we had taken the Aptheker colloquium, but
he wrote me this note about Lima.

Lage: Stiles Hall for years took this role.

Schorske: Right.

Lage: Max Rafferty?

Schorske: That's the letter from Clark Kerr where he was trying to brush
off some Rafferty pressure; he was under terrible pressure from
Rafferty and the right. This is an interesting letter from
Strong: "Dear Professor Schorske: Now that the ordeal is over,
I want to express my sincere appreciation to you for taking on
this extremely difficult chore of moderating the Lima meeting."
It wasn't "an ordeal," or even a difficult chore. "I have read
your thoughtful opening remarks and have heard from members
from my staff and others who were present how well you handled
the entire proceeding." Well, there was nothing to handle; it
was in Wheeler Aud; all were orderly people. "The continued
success of the open forum policy"--which Kerr and Strong
backed, certainly--"depends on the conduct of the programs."
That's where we would differ, because we would definitely want
to have an open forum policy. Only then is the question one of
containing any attempt to disrupt—but you have got to have the
principle of freedom first, then you could put the other after
that.

Then I wrote him. I'll just give you this [July 30, 1963).
I think you should read it; it's easier to do that.

Lage: We can put a copy of these letters in the oral history. [See

Appendix E) You refer here to the telephone campaigns to which
Strong was subjected.

Schorske: My wife found out that his wife had complained about the

telephone campaign to which he had been subjected. She told me
about it, so I could allude to the fact that I knew what
pressure he had been under.

Lage:

And this was before he really had to endure it, during the FSM.

Schorske:

Lage:
Schorske:
Lage:
Schorske:

Lage:
Schorske :

Lage:

Sure... sure. My wife told me that his wife said she found the
solution. She put the telephone at the bottom of her laundry
basket. [laughter] Isn't that sweet?

[laughter] She was a very sweet woman.
She was. Did you know her?
I knew her slightly.

I knew her hardly at all. 1 liked him. He was a sweet man
until, under the pressure and the crisis he grew rigid and
rudderless. He was in the Arts Club.

He was?

All the philosophers were strong in it.
said before, was one of the founders.

Stephen Pepper, as I

We have oral histories with Strong and Pepper, and with a lot
of this older generation of professors. [See University
History Series list following the index in this volume.)

Thoughts on the University in Society, and Instability and
Intellectual Creativity

Lage: Let's continue with the interest in free speech on the part of
the faculty.

Schorske: Yes, it was a continuous problem, and one of the things that it
led me to was really thinking through the relation between the
life of the university—what it is as an institution—and
public life.

Lage: The public life of a faculty member?

Schorske: No, the life of the whole community. How are we related? What
are our responsibilities to the whole community? And what is
the sociological relation of our vocation as educators and
scholars in the university? And what is the university in
society?

Lage: Was it more pertinent to the public university, or was this a
question you would ask also of a private university?

Schorske: It's a question of the nature of the university altogether,

over time, beginning in the Middle Ages. I became interested in
the subject of not just the intellectual content of thought,
but of the institutional form of learned thought that is
involved with the transmission and enlargement of learning. A
big problem.

The Berkeley thing crystallized it. Partly as a result of
being new here I began to see California as a unique setting,
historically, in modern American history. It has some
resemblance to a region I have Just been to for the first time
in my life that I adored touring in: Thuringia in Germany. It
contains Weimar, Erfurt, Eisenach--that 's one of the places of
Luther--and Jena, Gotha--a whole string of towns very important
to the political and cultural life of Germany at least from the
fourteenth to the twentieth century. Thuringia has always been
a society of political instability and polarization, of
religious, cultural, and social variety and instability, and
tremendous creativity. A strange mix. This was the mix I felt
in California, and at Berkeley.

Lage: Are you saying this in retrospect? Or was the comparison one
you thought of then?

Schorske: Thuringia I thought of then. Mind you, I wasn't just in
intellectual history; before I came to Berkeley I taught
general European history as well. And I've always been
interested in comparisons. Even my course was constructed
comparing England, France, and Germany. The other area like
Thuringia in modern history—in the nineteenth century and
twentieth century history—is the Reggio nell' Emilia in Italy .
It is another volatile social area with a lot of creativity,
but also with a lot of instability.

I first encountered Thuringia and Saxony as a student of
socialism. They figure big in socialist history, for both
areas have extremes of right and left, so its very hard to
construct something to hold that all together. It's also the
area of Goethe, of Nietzsche, of huge intellectual, cultural
titans. And university life in these regions is fascinating.
In my course I never talked about Thuringia itself— but about
its university, Jena. Jena was the university where Fichte and
Hegel taught. Why this place? Why should this suddenly be the
hot spot for philosophic innovation in the French Revolution?
What's going on? That kind of issue interested me. But with
it, then, how do the universities behave in relation to the
political authority outside, or political mass movements
outside?

The university is always bedeviled by people who want to
make instruments of it. In my opinion—and that's the thing
that crystallized for me at Berkeley—the university has to
take the tensions of society into its own body. It doesn't
resist them, it accepts them. But it insists that once inside
walls, the social tensions be Intellectualized. You have to
convert the poison of social discord into the sap of
intellectual vitality.

Lage: I see what you mean; I'm just wondering if that's what the
students had in mind, during FSM?

Schorske: Some of them had in mind turning the university over to their
own interests, social and ideological interests, as, too, many
of the regents did. Probably most of them thought very much
like other people: that this is a place which ought to serve my
purposes; my social purposes. That's a different thing from
trying to come to grips intellectually with the multi
dimensional character of the problems of society that are
surfacing in the university. There are many faculty members —
and that is a major factor always in universities—who see the
university as a place where they can pursue their private
scholarship quietly, without examining the university's
function for many, often conflicting, social interest groups.

Lage: They don't want these tensions brought in.

Schorske: If they do come in— and especially if they came to the students
and more civically oriented faculty— get them the hell out of
here! They don't belong here if they're trying to do that.
They don't necessarily make the same objection if the external
authorities try to impose a political standard on them, but
they can, as the oath crisis showed. They don't like that
either.

Schorske: I kind of lost my train of thought [during the tape change].

Lage: You were speaking of the role of the university in a time of
societal tensions.

Schorske: The tensions are here. Right. And the question is: to what
extent is that an eternal problem of the university, and to
what extent is it a temporary problem? You hit the head you
see. You have to fight now conservative Max Rafferty or
Senator Rnowland, now some student radical who's trying to stop
the university in its tracks. Michael Lerner once said to me--

Lage:

Schorske:

Lage:

Schorske:

Lage:
Schorske :

Lage:
Schorske:

I paraphrase--nWe'll turn this place into Slippery Rock State
Teachers' College, if you don't shape up."

This is like a threat?
Yes, a threat.

That puts you in the position of being in the middle in some
ways, but not quite.

It does in a way. What I see in that is that there are two
different principles in play: the principle of the university
is that of intellectual exploration and dispute; and the
principle of the society and the polity is of another kind.
The dynamic in each bears some relation to the others, but
they're not the same. Neither one has the right, in my
opinion, fully to govern the character and function of the
other. It isn't our business to tell them what to do, and it
isn't its business to tell us what to do. It's the dialectical
interaction between the two to find the right way of balancing
the meeting of the needs of the society with the meeting of the
needs of a university community that is part of a universal
community of learning much bigger than the polity in which it
is located. Learning itself is a verb. It's not a noun, it's a
process! But it has its own law, and that law has to be
respected by the civil society or it can't be carried on.

Were you thinking in these terms when you were actually
involved in the Emergency Executive Committee [during FSM]?

Before I became involved in that. My thinking had begun
earlier. It began with respect to the earlier crises we have
talked about. I remember giving a talk at Westminster House, a
Presbyterian center. They invited me to give something on the
idea of the university. To prepare for it, I sat down and
figured out a position on it for the first time. I gave this
lecture after that several times, usually to church or student
groups that were interested in it.

This was before FSM?

Right, before FSM. In the end I wrote about this subject,
was called something like "Professional Ethos and Public
Crisis." I See Appendix F] I gave the paper in the plenary
session of the Modern Language Association, to which I was
invited by Henry Nash Smith, who was one of my friends here at
Berkeley. That was in March 1967 or 1968. Into that paper
went all the stuff I had learned through the Berkeley
experience, but also in teaching my course: writings on this

subject, the private sphere, and the public sphere, and the
history of the university that I really investigated just as a
person who had gotten engrossed with this range of issues.

It was half a historical exercise, but I felt we had to put
ourselves into a historical perspective as we had to put
ourselves into a political perspective to see what was going on
outside the university and what was going on inside, and what
you could expect in terms of pressures on you, even from within
by external forces, but also from without.

Shifting Political Spectrums in the Sixties

Schorske: Now I'm talking personally here. It was a personal issue before
we got to that. If you ask Martin Malia, if you interview him
which I think it would be worth your doing, or Delmer Brown- -
no, I don't think he was involved in this—Martin and Delmer
became very close over the FSM things because they had a
conservative coalition, the Faculty Forum, to which most the
members of the history department leaned.

Lage: Was it conservative? Or would you call it centrist?

Schorske: A little of each. These are very difficult terms to fix. You
said earlier, "you sound like a centrist." I thought of myself
as a centrist. To me the Faculty Forum people were
conservative, to them I was a leftist. The watershed in
politics keeps shifting in a fluid social situation.

Lage: It shifted a lot during that year.

Schorske: It did. So people who were at one moment what you could

generally characterize as a large left — if the watershed begins
to shift, many of the people who were in the large left become
a large center, and the left becomes smaller, while the people
in the center begin to move right. That I really remember from
these days; the worst days of the crisis which were not these
early ones in '64, '65. To me, the most terrible ones were
'69, '70--in that era, which I had only one year of before I
left.

Lage: It was probably '68- '69.

Schorske: Maybe it was. Yes, '68-69. Then I experienced a lot of it.

The Third World strike is what I'm referring to. That was the
worst time I experienced. When things got to a certain point

in the disintegration of communal bonds, you have somebody at
your right who thinks you're a Maoist, and you have somebody at
your left who thinks you're a fascist. And you're in the
middle between these two, and every man in the whole community
has exactly the same experience. No matter if he's way over to
the right, or way over to the left, somebody thinks- -

Lage: --he's a fascist or a Maoist. [laughter]

Schorske: [laughter] Yes. That's when it got the worst. But normally
the larger groups define the options, and individuals shift
from one to another. Thus the watershed shifts — let "s say a
person like Irv Scheiner, who had been definitely with Larry
Levine and people like me further left of the spectrum early in
the conflict, became a centrist with Delmer and Martin. [The
Faculty Forum was the counterweight to the earlier "Committee
of Two Hundred." The latter--! remember now—was the name of
the larger group rallied by the old civil libertarian faculty
members that I belonged to. --added by Professor Schorske
during editing. ]

The Free Speech Movement --Some Recollections

Lage: Now that was during FSM.

Schorske: Yes, that is in the early and middle years of the university
crisis .

Lage: Maybe we should go back to FSM?

Schorske: We can. I'm not all that good on it.

Lage: Maybe your memories aren't as keen.

Schorske: They're not so clear.

The Emergency Executive Committee: Selection and Role

Lage: You were on the Emergency Executive Committee. It appears that
that was a group to defend those December 8 Academic Senate
resolutions, and you spoke to the Regents to persuade--

Schorske: That's right.

Lage: Do you remember anything about dealing with the Regents at that
point?

Schorske: Yes, I would have to backtrack a little bit because 1 think

that would get a little too detailed for my memory of the FSM;
maybe we should save that for anther time.

I want to tell you something interesting about the faculty
election to the Emergency Executive Committee. I found in my
files at home, and I don't think I brought it with me, but I
could supply it to you, some university document that listed
the candidates for the Emergency Executive Committee--maybe it
was a Daily Cal [the student newspaper). There was an election
list of maybe twenty-five or so candidates—a huge number of
people nominated. [See Appendix G]

I think in the end, six or seven were to be elected. The
report gave the number of votes received by the candidates on
the first round and the second round. I was, in a certain
sense, a candidate of the left. At least I was as far left on
the spectrum as you could go [on that list of candidates), and
I was not at the farthest left. There were, in that early
phase, John Searle, Reggie Zelnik and other people who were
much closer to the student position than I was myself.

Lage: But they weren't nominated?

Schorske: To the best of my knowledge they were not. I didn't see any of
their names on that list. Reggie Zelnik would be very reliable
on this kind of thing. We worked with our faculty group, but
he was much closer to the students in general.

Lage: He was very young and new at that point.
[Telephone interruption)

Lage: We were talking about the choice of members of the Emergency
Executive Committee, during the December 8, 1964, meeting of
the Academic Senate.

Schorske: Yes. And that was interesting because, firstly, the results of
the election were--I never analyzed it before, never thought of
it until 1 saw the results now — were preponderantly of the
professional school faculties: two lawyers, Arthur Sherry and
Richard Jennings [ex officio as chair of the Academic Senate);
two business school people, Art Ross, who became the chairman
of the committee, and Budd [Earl] Cheit, who's still at the
business school; and one professor from the agricultural
school, [Raymond] Bressler. Thus five of seven were from the
professional schools. Only two came from Arts and Science: an

older molecular biologist very close to the medical school and
myself. I was the only person from Arts and Science, pure and
simple.

Lage: And this was by vote from twenty-five to--

Schorske: So that was the second round. So I got through the net, in

effect. I had the second largest number of votes on the first
round, with twenty-five or so candidates running. In the
second round, however, I had very few more votes than I had on
the first round; just about the same number. Thus the other
faculty members had converged on the professional school
candidates .

Lage: That's very interesting.

Schorske: I found it fascinating because the professional school

candidates were not people who had been very vocal on the floor
of the Senate when all these debates were going on, when every
third speaker was from the history department or some other
political--

Lage : It sounds like they picked the moderates.

Schorske: They did, but there were many moderate candidates from Arts and
Sciences. They picked more than the moderates; they were all
people with a long campus history of committee work. This
institution is faculty run, but it's run through committees.
Usually from the committees, we get then a tier of elite people
who will become chancellors or deans or things like that. So
it's a continuum, what they call middle management. It was the
middle management of the faculty bureaucracy that prevailed in
this election.

Lage: Had you been involved in committee work?

Schorske: Very little.

Lage: You hadn't been there long enough?

Schorske: No. I was on the library committee.

Lage: The Budget Committee?

Schorske: The Budget Committee. I was not on that. That was the

committee that Delmer Brown headed with such distinction, a
very important committee that did faculty appointments and
promotions. I went before them for my department, but I don't
think I was on it. I certainly wasn't an experienced hand like

the other Emergency Executive members in committee work, and I
was not known on the campus. But on the other hand, the people
who were there, in effect, involved with the politics of civil
liberties and academic freedom would know me. That may have
been why I had the same amount of votes in the first as in the
second round of elections while everybody else changed all over
the place.

I thought it was interesting, and I say it because I think
it affected, in a positive way, the way we executed our brief
mission—dealing with the Regents. One particularly fine man,
Art Sherry—he was an experienced sort in California Democratic
circles. He knew the Democratic Party establishment in
California— married to an Oakland family. Just old style
Berkeley, before all the international cosmopolitans moved in.
But he was invaluable; giving us legal and political advice in
how to deal with this regent and that regent. He knew all the
scoop and stuff about them and so on.

So we were a very motley group. But we got on fine with
each other, and we did so partly thanks to Martin Meyerson, the
acting chancellor, who really worked closely with us. We also
had our lines to the Senate. It was more important in some
ways that we could deal with the faculty than directly dealing
with the Regents, though that had importance at a certain
point.

Lage: So you had not just the role to interpret the Academic Senate
to the Regents, you had an ongoing—

Schorske: It was more. As the Emergency Committee, we were involved with
helping keep the place together during that time. Of course,
keeping it together meant keeping the faculty reasonably
together, and getting the policies oriented in such a way that
we wouldn't cause a lot of absolutely unnecessary provocation
of the students. That was the second problem. That was a big
problem for me because most of the other members weren't as
used to dealing with students. People in the professional
schools would have a different student mix than the ones I
would have access to.

So there wasn't experience, and there wasn't much
imagination either. There were these two sides of the thing,
and in that way the connection that I had also with the
centrists, or conservatives, whatever you want to call them,
with the Malia and the Browns of this world who also had ties
with students- -that was useful, as well as my ties to Reggie
Zelnik and Stampp, and the student clientele they would be in
touch with. I don't want to personalize this too much; it's a

Lage:
Schorske:

functional position derivative from being on the committee.
There is not in any way a fixed constitutional or institutional
clarity that 1 can give you on the committee, a short-lived
highly provisional institution. We were the university's jury-
rig in the storm. We had what looked like an important job at
the time, but probably had little to do with the outcome.

As a committee, we saw ourselves in the middle between two
major constituencies: the Regents on the one side, and the
students on the other. But our major responsibility was and
had to be to the faculty, making sure it held together in
practical pursuit of proper academic principles.

And this seems to have sort of short-circuited the
administration. It sounds like you were--

By the administration, you mean the central administration?
You mean Clark Kerr?

Lage: No, Strong.

Schorske: No, Strong is gone [by January 2, 1965]. Had he not collapsed,
there would have been no Emergency Executive Committee. Martin
Meyerson was the acting chancellor. We worked very closely
with him.

Lage: So he drew you in?

Schorske: There was not tension with him at all. On the contrary, he

paid great attention to us, and we paid great attention to him,
and did things together. I don't want to exaggerate that we
had power in our hands, but he was reduced to a great deal of
speech-making and ceremonial roles. We did that too. Like
other Emergency Committee members, I talked around the state to
alumni groups to convince them and the public of the justice
and necessity of the December 8 Resolutions. What were they
for? What did it mean that the faculty espoused the principles
of free speech and assembly of the student movement?

Lage: You had thought these issues through.

Schorske: Like many others, I thought them through during the pre-FSM
academic freedom and civil liberties episodes we have
discussed. I had to think them through before the FSM crisis
ever happened.

Interpreting the University to Alumni and Regents

Lage :
Schorske:

The alumni weren't happy, as I recall,
to them?

How did it go, talking

Lage:
Schorske:

Lage:
Schorske ;
Lage:
Schorske:

Lage:
Schorske:

On the whole, very well. But that doesn't mean you solved the
problems of mutual understanding. Alumni are people who have
the deepest respect for faculty people. You come with a huge
advantage, whatever you may think of them as prejudiced or
something- -they remember their university as you remember it,
for the fine lectures you had, et cetera. They don't want the
Reds to take it over, but they don't want it to go to hell in a
hack in some other way either. You can at least count on their
giving you an ear. They're going to sit and listen. If they
argue back, okay.

I don't want to exaggerate how many audiences I faced, but
I never felt much hostility. You'd get more of it in the
general public that you would get in an alumni audience, and
you certainly got more of it in the Regents. The Regents had a
strong group of conservatives already before [Governor Ronald]
Reagan, though the bulk could be called centrists politically.

A lot of them were Pat Brown Democrats.

That's right. And not all of those were liberal, because Pat
Brown appointed some very conservative southern Californians--
very tough. Like the fellow who was the head of the May
Company, whom he reappointed, was an L.A. Republican.

[Edward W. ] Carter?

Carter, yes.

He was a long-time regent. And [Edwin W. ] Pauley.

Pauley, yes, my god. These were tough types. Then there were
a few others who were strongly liberal, especially Bill
[William M.] Roth. Ellie Heller, and--

[William K. ] Coblentz?

Right. Those are the three who understood us best and to whom
we had the easiest access. They had their problems inside the
Regents too. Part of the problem was that Clark Kerr was in a
very weakened position by virtue of the crisis and its
background. While he had gotten the Communist speaker ban
rescinded, he had taken measures against the students. He had

a lot of responsibility and was answerable to the Regents, and
there were things he couldn't control there either.

Resentments toward Clark Kerr

Lage : How did you feel about the way Kerr handled the whole
situation?

Schorske: From the beginning, not well at all. I was among many who felt
that calling the police was a disastrous mistake. In the end,
I became aware that he always operated under many constraints
that one has to recognize as his political climate. He was
between the devil and the deep blue sea. He apparently didn't
succeed very well in his public persona with the Berkeley
faculty before I got here. Maybe Strong was chancellor.

Lage: Kerr was president when you came to Berkeley. Glenn Seaborg
was chancellor at Berkeley when you came, I believe, and then
Strong came in '61.

Schorske: That's right. But all I know is that Clark Kerr was not

popular around the Berkeley campus with the faculty on the
whole. He had his very loyal supporters: Earl Cheit was one of
them, Jennings was another. They were both on the executive
committee. But then there were people who felt that he was
devious and so on. The thing I felt you could never take away
from him was his imagination in developing the whole state
system in which each campus would have its own special
character. I thought it was a very unusual and masterful piece
of work, even though he had undermined a lot of his best work
in the interest of uniformity and centralism in administration.

Lage: Did you think that some of the resentment towards him was kind
of a Berkeley-first attitude?

Schorske: Definitely.

Lage: Fear that Berkeley would be diminished by the growth of the new
campuses?

Schorske: Yes. I was a great believer in decentralization myself. The
very basis of Clark's achievement, to create all these
differentiated branches, would have as its natural consequence
--such was my way of thinking about it--the according of a
great deal more autonomy to these individual campuses to pursue
their individuality. To do this all under a bureaucratic

centralism is dangerous, and when Berkeley became a danger to
the system because it was so advanced intellectually as a
traditional research university—it was the envy of the other
places — it was seen as too powerful. On the other hand,
Berkeley was not supportive on the whole of the other places
as, in my view, it should have been.

Berkeley people snubbed the other campuses. But, then,
there was an attempt to make equalization by holding Berkeley
back and holding Berkeley down. So Clark Kerr's centralization
of institutions like the statewide Academic Senate and so on,
worked against precisely the differentiated characteristics of
the state system that Clark himself had designed and espoused.
Partly by circumstance, in effect, he imposed centralistic
governing principals on top of a university system whose
pluralism and differentiation was its glory.

Lage: He did make efforts to decentralize the Academic Senate, and I
have been told that Berkeley objected because they would no
longer have control over Davis appointments and the like.

Schorske: I don't remember that. Which doesn't mean that I'm right. I
really can't say. During the first crisis years at least, the
statewide senate was pronouncedly anti-Berkeley.

Lage: It's sort of off our subject.
Schorske: It is a bit, but it's important.

Lage: But I think the reason for some of the resentment toward Clark
Kerr is not off our subject.

Schorske: No it isn't, and I remember that we had to vote in his favor in
the end when the Regents really tried to force Kerr's
resignation— and Meyerson's—they wanted to get rid of
Meyerson. They were after us too: the Emergency Committee and
the Berkeley faculty, simply. So we rallied to Kerr. In a
very peculiar way, the faculty was a big power without knowing
it, or without being effectual in exercising its power.

Berkeley was still the strongest campus in the system
internationally, not just nationally, and certainly in the
state. So at one level, it had to be controlled, because its
autonomy, such as it had, was proving disruptive to the system,
in terms of internal turmoil. Berkeley was taking the lead,
spurred by the students, to achieve academic freedom and full
civil rights for the University at the same time. On the other
hand, if you crushed down on it too hard, you destroy your
major asset. That was a regental dilemma for the thoughtful

regents. We had the wonderful Byrne Report on reconstructing
the university, which Bill Roth was very involved in [See
Chapter IV.]

Lage: Now that's a different Byrne from the state legislative

[Senator Hugh] Burns Committee on Un-American Activities who
made a report on the overall crisis.

Schorske: Yes, the Byrne report was prepared in Los Angeles. I worked

with him [Jerome Byrne] for a while as an informal consultant.
We could go into a lot of things: also the journalistic side--
the reporting on the campus "turmoil" and what we did to try to
bring our side to the public press, which was so difficult.
There we had real contests because as I remember it Clark Kerr
was close to the labor and perhaps education editors of the New
York Times who did reports on the Berkeley scene that were very
unfavorable to the positions the Senate had taken. They
stressed the actions, the "insubordination," but left out the
principles at issue and the provocative actions by both the
administration and the state.

Lage: So this was part of the Emergency Executive Committee's role?

Schorske: No; I don't think we tackled that as a group. I wouldn't say

so. But our little faculty caucus tackled it--I can't remember
whether before or after. I think it was just after. The
little group that 1 belonged to with Henry Smith, Stampp,
Sellers, Wolin, Zelnik, Selznick, Howard Schachman--the group
was fluid.

Lage: Was it named? Or was it just sort of--

Schorske: It didn't have a name, it was a caucus that came out of the

pre-FSM civil libertarian concerns (including those involved in
the loyalty oath controversy) and then got enlarged during the
crisis into what was called the Committee of Two Hundred. We
just came together, and with some new people. That's when
Reggie Zelnik joined it. I think in the early stages Larry
Levine was in it; I'm not sure, the group was very elastic and
fluid. There were a lot of historians involved, comparatively.
That group continued as long as there was a need for an
autonomous stand, commensurate with the positions we had taken
that led to the resolutions of December 8. To promote and
sustain those positions — that was our cement.

Beyond Free Speech; Filthy Speech. Sexual Liberation. Anti-War.
Third World, and Women's Movements

Schorske: In early 1965, the political and civil liberty issues began to
recede in the direction of disciplinary issues, and above all,
the filthy speech business—which really rocked the faculty.

Lage: That really disturbed them? They couldn't laugh that off?

Schorske: They couldn't. They didn't laugh the earlier political phase
off either; that was an issue of academic and civic freedom in
substance, but often disruption and/or insubordination in
practice produced a new level of anxiety. The new issue,
involving sexual expression, however, was a threat to the
faculty's non-academic culture.

Lage: The filthy speech incident [March 1965]?

Schorske: Yes. To the degree that the students espoused it so that, in
effect, sexual liberation or cultural liberation—whatever you
want to call it—became part of the movement- -that was
something which the university professorate could not deal
with. They didn't know how to deal with an assault on cultural
mores, either personally or institutionally. So it was
something beyond academic discipline or insubordination. I
think it was psychological subversion.

The filthy speech incident was probably purely accidental;
it was not planned or plotted, I don't think. But new sexual
freedom became so much a part of the movement. It belongs to
the Beat, you see, that began to become the cultural currency
of the avant-garde student left. So among the other
hypocrisies the activists felt they were destroying was sexual
hypocrisy. That was something which ran against the grain of
most of their elders in some sense, and there were very few
people who could roll with it easily. They didn't know how to
handle it. I can't say any more about it. It was just not
something you could exactly deal with in terms of, say, the
coordinates of civil academic principles and mores with which
my thinking had been developing. They didn't really have any
place in it. What do you do with a guy who's walking around
stark naked— wasn't he?--or who is calling you a mother-fucker?
What are you supposed to do with that? [laughter]

Lage: Now we take it for granted, but at the time—
Schorske: No, it wasn't taken for granted.

Lage: Did people fall by the wayside at that point?

Schorske: I really think that people then felt--then you begin to sense

the continua of the movement- -deregulation of sex life, women's
lib, Third World studies—and in a way the tragedy is that some
of these continua were to the real deep issues of the society.
Thus the Third World movement contained in it real problems.

Lage: Now that was —

Schorske: I know, that's another phase, but from the beginning many of the
people who were involved in the Free Speech Movement were
involved because they were involved in the civil rights movement,
with its important implications for the Third World movement.

Lage: That's right.
tt

Lage: I wanted to ask you more about your perceptions of the so-
called filthy speech movement. I have often looked at it as an
irritant — the students always pressing to see where they could
add a further insult.

Schorske: Well, I think it had some of that. I think when it began— that
one little guy who walked alone with the "dirty word" on his
banner--! don't think that was part of a strategy on somebody's
part, I think that was probably one little guy, and then his
issue was taken up.

What I remember, and this is now a little later phase, but
it was the moment when there was a meeting of some kind which
Searle and Cheit, on behalf of Chancellor Heyns, tried to
forbid in the new student union.' At that moment, there was a
police bust, and I was very opposed to this. This was another,
I thought, terrible moment to bring in the police— the second
time. The first time it was Sproul Hall, and the second time
it was this — I mean on a major scale — to arrest the leaders.

The response of the students was then to sing the Beatles
song, the "Yellow Submarine." Going from Joan Baez to the
"Yellow Submarine," I thought, was a great moment of cultural
transition, because it went from political protest to sensual
escapism; and a certain kind of sardonic utopianism. The

'November 30, 1966--A sit-in inside the student union to protest navy
recruiters on campus was broken up by UC and Berkeley police, assisted by
Alameda County sheriffs.

song's "Octopus1 Garden" under the sea: that was fantasy land
to which to withdraw, already a certain kind of proclamation of
defeat and solidarization in defeat instead of some kind of
forward-looking thrust. It expressed the totality of the
movement's separation rather than their penetration or

transformation of the machinery of authority,
different thing.

It's a totally

Lage: And it was a turn from the interest of civil rights and civil
libertarianism to kind of the—

Schorske: Well, yes and no because—now I don't remember the exact
precipitate — it may have been a protest against a naval
recruiting thing; we are also entering the high protest phase
of the Vietnam War. The fact is that much of this thing— this
is very impressionistic American history here— that you go from
the momentum of the civil rights movement, the arrestation of
the civil rights movement for a bit, and then the passage onto
the Vietnam War, to this tremendous thing which, again, turned
off a generation. This is a big deal! Certainly the educated
part, or the educating part— people who were getting an
education— were turned off in a major way. Part of the
reaction was in culture: sexual liberation and drug culture.

I haven't said anything about that. I was involved in the
Vietnam War protest movement. Not all the faculty members who
were involved in Free Speech were involved in that.

Lage: Do you see them as separate? Or again a continuum?

Schorske: I see them as separate and also continuous. It's possible to

pursue one line and not the other; it is quite possible to be a
vigorous opponent of the Vietnam War, and to go on a lecture
circuit for that cause and never even worry about free speech
and all these things because you're so concerned about that war
issue. It is also possible to be so concerned about the
university and how to reorganize the rights of the people in it
and protect academic freedom at the same time, and never worry
about the Vietnam War. So, why not?

Lage: You have that whole spectrum.

Schorske: Right. And you have another spectrum, which is the movement of
minorities themselves, who have their own axes to grind. Or
the women's movement, which was still too young to be a factor
in the politics of the university crisis, but was already
rising as an issue. One of the great things about the sexual
issue is that it injected and gave vigor to the women's
liberation movement. No question; there was a relation there.

So all these things—they ' re different strands that are playing
in and out in the crisis, currents that are interacting and
intersecting and parting again.

Lage: It's not a simple thing to talk about or to analyze.

Schorske: Very, very complicated. 1 certainly don't feel 1 have ever
understood it. [laughter]

Lage: [laughter] We'll get to something simple, more

straightforward: in all of this—I'm looking at FSM, but it
could pertain later too—did the tenured professors have a
greater sense of security in taking part in these protests?
Did the non-tenured professors ever feel that their position in
the university was threatened if they exercised their rights of
free speech and academic freedom?

Schorske: I'm not a good person to answer the question. I would say in
my department, I don't think the young would have justly had
such a view, and I doubt they did, but you should ask them.
Irv Scheiner would be a very good informant; he has very good
antennae for everybody's sensibilities.

Lage: But it wasn't something foremost in your mind?

Schorske: No, I didn't think that. I thought the university could be
ruined by the external forces and the Regents, or by student
excesses, but not by a junior-senior split in the faculty, or
by intimidation of the juniors. I also thought the attempt at
disrupting classes was a dangerous weapon, which I never
approved of. In fact, I didn't approve of the strike. I felt
if the students made it, we should respect it on the campus of
the university, but I would never interrupt the classes. I
held my classes off campus for I felt my primary responsibility
was to all the students who wanted to learn.

Liberating the Educational Imagination

Schorske: And I'll tell you an interesting thing: as this crisis dragged
on, of course, the liberation of educational imagination became
very interesting. The thing that was so often said, that on
this campus intellectual life was being stopped dead, was just
totally contrary to my experience. I thought Just the
opposite.

Lage: That it was invigorating?

Schorske: Yes, it was invigorating. Not necessarily in the right way.
There were many people who were trying to make purely
instrumental use of the university and harness it completely to
their own concerns, to solve the problems that they had; that's
always so, but now more intensely. The critique of the
university, expressed in the student slogan, "Don't fold;
spindle, or mutilate," was vastly exaggerated, but never mind.
There was a basic truth in that slogan, and for me as a
teacher, I felt it so deeply as a challenge that I thought we
couldn't go on without addressing the university's
impersonality toward students.

At the worst times, when there was a real classroom
closure, I took my classes off campus, sometimes with great
resistance from some of my students who didn't approve of my
doing that. I was absolutely firm about that: I would not
stop teaching. I remember thinking- -then, when we had police
busts (that was always the worst for me)--that, Okay, this
university can well be destroyed. Between the hammer and the
anvil, you can squash a human being easily: so too a
university. I thought, If this thing spreads to other campuses
the university as a world system for learning might collapse.
The crisis has already been to Tokyo, Berlin is very restive,
Columbia is getting uneasy. We've had episodes in Chicago even
before ours, episodes which could have broken into something
drastic if the Chicago administration, unlike ours, hadn't been
so intelligent and allowed people to sit for a week in the
president's office, or more--I don't remember how long—without
ever calling a cop.

Lage: They handled it.

Schorske: They handled it well. There were places that knew how to
handle it, and there were places that didn't, but once the
movement rose to a certain point, such kinds of patient skill
isolating the most radical tactical activists disappeared.
With the university's recourse to force, you got the momentum
of sentiment based on grievance and maltreatment. Then you
were in trouble. But, be that as it may, suppose the academic
system began to collapse in the American environment of moral
rejection of the worst national policies. I'm thinking the
Vietnam War. I'm thinking the civil rights movement. I'm
thinking the idealism that is behind the protest movements and
the legitimacy of the claims. If those are not recognized by
social authorities in the universities, and there's no approach
to the radical pressures from within except the use of more
force, then we academics may be on the street.

Let me tell you an episode that reflects my state of mind
at the time. One day I took an airplane to go to a meeting in
the East — and when I took a plane I very often had a martini.
I was not usually a martini drinker, but when I left my
troubles and duties behind on a trip I liked to get high on a
martini--as I could when 30,000 feet above the ground. That
absolutely always could be counted on to liberate my fantasies.

On this trip, in the midst of the crisis, one of the things
I fantasized about was: if this system of universities that has
lasted this long in this country starts to break up, if
Berkeley goes, how are we going to continue the vocation of
learning? How are we going to start up again? The function
can't stop. We've got to continue to teach, we've got to
continue to learn. How are we going to do that? I got the
idea: let's go back to the Middle Ages.

Our universities were started by a bunch of wandering
friars, so to speak, and I would get the like-minded who would
be worrying this bone, and we would gather together to make
universities as at their medieval origins. We would settle
informally, like piano teachers settling in the same part of
town, hanging out a shingle and saying, "Come, I'll teach you
history, if that's what you want. Others will teach you
physics or classics or something."

Lage: The free university.

Schorske: Something like that. But the university would be, in effect,
based on the common vocation of the scholars. The idea was
that. The free university, as it was spoken of by students, if
I remember it, was centered on a certain idea of society. My
idea was that you put forward an idea of a university, or that
you continue the function of the university, but that we
scholars would do this as something like an autonomous class,
like Coleridge's clerisy, that is self-sustaining, that is
lacking institutional support. It would be ghastly for
scientists who need labs, for the humanists who need libraries,
for all kinds of things.

Such was the fantasy. It was also rock bottom, What is it
we're really in business for? If the conflicting social forces
are likely to destroy the university at this point, then we
scholars become a vested interest group in sustaining a certain
kind of social function which has to do with the creation,
transmission, and development of culture controlled by agreed
intellectual procedures of knowing. You're in a vocation;
you're like a minister. It's half ethical and it's half
intellectual, but it's something like that.

Lage: It really made you think about the very basics of your place.
Schorske: Absolutely. It drove me right down to the rock bottom.

Lage: This was later on, I'm assuming. Towards the end of the
sixties that--?

Schorske: I would say it would be in one of the great Vietnam protest

periods, or possibly when—it was a very great disappointment
to me—Chancellor Heyns and above all Earl Cheit and—

Lage: John Searle?

Schorske: Searle, yes— reverted to the use of police against the student
movement .

But that was where there was hopefulness. There was a lot
of folly, but there were also a lot of new educational ideas,
including in history. Wonderful things done, later dropped
because they weren't capable of long-term institutionalization.
But fine experiments, and above all, a very inventive thinking
that had to do with where the scholarship now was. It wasn't
just socially and politically dealing with students or what
not; it was also something about how to educate a new
generation in a humane and humanistic way.

So those were the promising things, and then the resumption
of street-fighting, of conflicts over real estate, like the
People's Park and so forth—

Lage: And Governor Reagan' s —

Schorske: Yes, and the tear-gasing was just the high moment of this

reaction. That was not the fault of Chancellor Heyns1 team of
course. Nothing to do with it. But their use of police,
again, and arrest of student leaders in the one case I'm
thinking about, that was a bitter blow to me. I just felt
very—

Lage: Were you on the team at that point?

Schorske: Yes.

Lage: You were in the chancellor's office?

Schorske: I think I was still in the chancellor's office, but on a term's
leave. I was not in on the decision.

Lage: I think we should leave some of that, and we just have to
resume next time, because you're tired.

Schorske: Yes, we've got to quit. I think I'm out of gas.

III FACULTY RETENTION AND RECRUITMENT, AND DIVERSITY ON CAMPUS
IN THE SIXTIES

[Interview 2: May 5, 1997] II

Some Departing Faculty: Landes, Rosovsky, and Kuhn

Lage: We're going to pick up a few things that weren't totally
discussed last time, more than six months ago.

Schorske: Right. First, this number one [on the interview outline--"More
on your chairmanship and faculty recruiting."]

Lage: We did discuss who left the department during your period here,
and why in some cases. You talked about Curtis and Lyon with
some distress over the Free Speech Movement; and of course
Bridenbaugh--

Schorske: --over the Kuhn and Dupree matter.
Lage: Right. Do you recall any others?

Schorske: I recall others who left, yes. Now, one should sunder people
who were assistant professors and didn't get over the bar, or
who left as juniors, from people who were here and left
afterward. To take the latter case first would be the
simplest.

In my time, it was amazing how few losses there were.
Aside from the ones we have mentioned, there were [David]
Landes, Kuhn, and myself; and that's a nine-year span that I
was here. That's all I remember, which doesn't mean there
might not have been others. But surely in my field in European
history, I don't think there were any others who left. Bouwsma
departed after I did, but soon returned.

Lage: Retaining good faculty is part of building the department; the
other side of the coin from attracting people.

Schorske: Right. Natalie Davis and Peter Brown- -both of whom came to

Princeton—they were hired after I had been here, and they left
after I had been here.

Lage: And came to join you?

Schorske: They came to Princeton. In this chronological order: Kuhn,

myself, Davis, and Brown ended up in Princeton. Rosovsky and
Landes went first to Harvard. Landes took the job at Harvard
which I turned down. While — or just after--! had been
chairman, I was offered that job, and I refused. I was still
very involved with Berkeley. This was before the evenements of
'64. Then after I turned Harvard down, Landes was invited and
took the job.

Lage: And I think other people have told me he was disturbed with the
unrest on campus.

Schorske: Well, this is interesting: he was not here when the student

unrest took place; he had left. [Landes 's date of separation
was 1964.]

Lage: He'd already left?

Schorske: He had left. So had Kuhn [left in 1964 also]. They both left
within a year, or maybe the same year, I'm not sure. That can
be checked. After the Sproul Hall sit-ins, Landes wrote a
letter to the New York Times very critical of Berkeley and its
ways. Kuhn wrote an answer.

The fact of the matter is that Kuhn had something closer to
my view of the events, although he was not here. He didn't
have the really deep anxiety and hostility to the student
movement in general of many faculty members. He was not as
conservative a man as Landes, and he came up with another,
better defense of what was going on here that didn't mean a
ratification of it all, but it did mean that they divided in
their assessment. They were out of here, but they both were
engaged.

I should mention one other very important man who was in
the department--! should have mentioned him perhaps above all--
that was [Henry] Rosovsky, who was an economic historian in
both Russian and Japanese history [also in the Department of
Economics]. A splendid scholar; and you know that he became
ultimately the provost of Harvard, or, as I guess it was called

first, the dean of the faculty. He had been very active
immediately at the outbreak of troubles in the fall of '64,
trying to intercede with Clark Kerr. He was a very moderate
and mediating kind of person, and he didn't have any success.
Now, that does not necessarily explain why he left here. I do
not know. Surely there were other attractions to Harvard for
him.

But the fact is that, along with other colleagues, 1
regarded him as a major loss to the university and the
department, because he had already manifested a kind of
selfless administrative talent. This is a little different
from being ambitious for an administrative post. He had a
sense of civic responsibility to assume administrative duties,
and he did it in a moment of considerable danger to the
university, but also with consequences for himself. He lost
his game at that moment in which many people, myself included,
supported him to the degree that we knew about his quiet work.

Lage : He was interceding on behalf of some tolerance for the
students?

Schorske: Yes. I think what all of us felt--no, that's wrong, absolutely
wrong. What many of us felt in the very beginning is that you
do not deal with students with police force. You don't use
police methods. Now, different people have different degrees
of commitment to that principle. Mine is pretty near iron
clad.

Lage: So that was one of your guiding- -

Schorske: If shooting begins, you intervene with force or something like
that; but in a general way, the quickness on the trigger is
costly. One must get people talking—as well as you can, and
it's not easy. When people go wild, they go wild on both
sides. But anyway, Rosovsky was a person who had that
patience, that you work it out, you listen to a lot of
insults, and so on and so on, but you try not to intervene.
We're skipping to another topic.

Lage: I know we are, but —

Schorske: All I want to say is I think Rosovsky was a loss which had to

do with a sense on his part that the central government of this
university, the state level, Clark Kerr and the Regents with
their rigidity and aggressive response to student claims and
actions made it difficult to keep the university intact in the
crisis. Rosovsky should be the guy to tell you, is this true
or false? Not I. But that was my estimate of his behavior

when I didn't know him that well; for at the time, I didn't.
He was in economics, I believe, as well as in history, and not
so active in our departmental councils. Delmer Brown could
help, perhaps, with this.

Thorough. Comparative Searches for New Faculty in History

Lage: Did you yourself, especially as chair, get involved in
recruiting new faculty?

Schorske: Yes.

Lage: Were there any particular ones you want to mention?

Schorske: Yes, I remember my first committee. It wasn't as the chair.
You know, in the history department, in some ways the chair
wasn't that big a deal, or I never thought it was. We were a
very collegially run department. There was power in the chair
as mediator between the collegial departmental government and
the administration. That was very important, because the chair
would have to advise the administration as well as advise the
department. But when it came to recruiting and things like
that, it was all somehow intradepartmental business, conducted
collectively.

So even if you were just a member of a committee, a
recruiting committee, an appointments committee, you were
already in the big deal. You have to realize that when we
appointed a person in this university--! "m not sure it's true
today, I don't really know, so much has changed- -but the
presumption was that the new appointee had an open road up. If
you succeeded from the beginning of your instructorship or
assistant professorship to the end of that—it was a six-year
term when I was here, I think—you had a presumption of
promotion. You were not even compared with other scholars in
the field to the degree that was and is common in other quality
universities like my present one, Princeton, where, when you
come up for tenure, you are really put up to it, because the
whole national roster of people at that age level in that
discipline, that particular sub-discipline, are surveyed for
comparative purposes.

Promotion to tenure was always a big deal here too, but not
so comparative. The assumption was, we are at a moment now of
making a really big commitment. We have to make sure that the
person we commit to is really in the top drawer of his field.

But when you begin your junior appointments, you had the
assumption that that would be so.

Lage: That was different from Harvard, I've been told.

Schorske: Yes. From Harvard, and as far as I know, from most of the Ivy
League schools. I would include Chicago and others. I don't
know enough about the middle western state universities. But
UC was very open, and one of the reasons it was open was
because- -and here's a very positive thing about Clark Kerr--he
was improving the quality of the university while expanding it.
The whole state was expanding the university; it was an
expanding state. The state had intelligent leadership, partly
anchored in the legislature, one that prized the educational
system. They were open to making it grow as the state's
population grew and its wealth grew.

Lage: It wasn't the steady state or the shrinking state that we think
of now.

Schorske: Right. With expansion, tensions are reduced also because you
could assume more obligations, realize more possibilities. As
soon as the university shrinks, then the jousting for positions
begins. That's much more difficult. So we had that advantage
in recruiting.

But the people who did the recruiting—and here I would
signal again Bridenbaugh, Sontag, Stampp, May—these were
people who were here longer, or who were already in tenure when
I came. I think Bridenbaugh, Stampp, and Sontag, even though
they later parted ways, they all had a really very fine sense
of how to avail themselves of this opportunity.

So you asked me if I was involved; I was involved like
everybody else, on search committees. But when we searched for
a beginner, we searched with the seriousness that one would
expect if we were making a tenure appointment. I don't want to
go too far with this, but the candidate's stuff was really
read, the stuff was seriously discussed, we made very big
comparative searches.

George Stocking. Robert Paxton, Werner Angress

Schorske: One of the people I failed to mention as leaving was a man who
left at a younger stage. That was George Stocking [at
Berkeley, 1960-1968] in the history of anthropology. He was

not in the history of anthropology when he came here, he was
kind of a new social historian. He was out of the University
of Pennsylvania. The department didn't do its shopping only in
the very top graduate schools; Pennsylvania was second-cut, but
a good school with lots of talent flowing through which they
trained well.

Stocking was a student of a man named Cochran who, if I
remember correctly, was an Americanist interested in social
history in a quantitative way, one of the front runners in that
field. Stocking was already losing his interest in that kind
of work, and very soon began to do anthropological history.
When we hired him, if my memory is right, he was betwixt and
between. And yet we were all taken with him. He was very
reflective, modest, and soft-spoken. He was no big dynamo, but
turned out to be a major historian in the field of
anthropological history. He left here for Chicago because he
got a double appointment in anthropology and history.

Lage : Was he interested in the history of the discipline of
anthropology?

Schorske: Yes.

Lage: But not using anthropological techniques?

Schorske: Not centrally. On the contrary, he was using the techniques of
intellectual history to explore anthropology's history. He was
another intellectual historian, as it turned out. That was not
why he was hired or how he was hired. He was hired for
American social history, I believe. In the end, he did almost
all his work—well, it was a mixture of Europe and America. He
got into German stuff, English stuff, American stuff. He
played the field in the history of anthropology in the same way
that Kuhn did for the history of physics. It was not a
nationally delimited field of study for him, and that was part
of the strength of his work. A very fine man. We loved him
and hated to see him go. I think most would agree with me.

Lage: Would there be a reason why he was attracted away?

Schorske: I think yes, because we didn't have that good an anthropology
department. For a while we had a very good crowd. They came
from Chicago and they went back to Chicago. Their leader was
Clifford Gertz, whom you probably know.

Lage:

Well, the anthropology department thinks they're very good.

Schorske: They may be now. They had one or two people who were

wonderful. They had a superb person in physical anthropology,
Sherwood Washburn. That, however, was not what interested
Stocking. The new field—and his--was cultural anthropology.
The older field, which was plowed beautifully by Washburn was
physical anthropology. He was one of the pioneers in showing
the socialization of animal life.

Anyway, Stocking was right to go to Chicago. Anybody could
see, that when he was breaking into such a field this was the
place to have a joint appointment in history and anthropology.
I think that was given to him.

Lage: So that was the man who came and left.

Schorske: Yes, he was the one. And another fine person we had here that
left in his junior rank was Paxton. Robert Paxton [at
Berkeley, 1961-1967], who went to SUNY [State University of New
York] at Stony Brook, and later taught at Columbia. He's quite
traditional in his methods. He's a political history student
of French fascism and its antecedents in the French republic,
but he came to focus on Vichy and did all the finest ground
breaking work in that field. He was a shy young man. He
wasn't, in my opinion, adequately cultivated here. I include
myself in this indictment, though we were friendly and so were
many. Nobody snubbed him; it's just that he wasn't appreciated
in accordance with what 1 think turned out to be his real
quality, which was very high intellectually and included a lot
of political courage and moral autonomy that proved central to
his achievement.

One of the signs of his courage was his imperviousness to
social pressures. Paxton was a reserve officer in the navy,
and he joined the officers' club. He was a bachelor. Once
when he wanted to give a party for the other members of the
department, he invited us to Treasure Island where the navy had
an officers' club. Or perhaps it was Yerba Buena Island.
Anyway, this was at a time early in the Vietnam War when most
of us were very much on an anti-military kick. We had no love
for the ROTC.

Lage: His was almost a political statement.

Schorske: What was interesting about it was, it was and it wasn't a

political statement. What it was, was: "I am my man. I am who
I am. I am a naval reserve officer." He also became later on
a very strong enemy of the Vietnam War. Never mind; at the
time these were not his concerns. He was already working on

the problem of Vichy,
fascist historian.

He was, in effect, a documented anti-

But he had a sense of his own person, and it included being
a naval person, and so he invited the department to his club.
I thought it was great, but it was not politically correct.

Lage: Did people go?

Schorske: Sure. As far as I know. My wife and I attended. I think most
people went. I don't know whether he invited the whole
department; it doesn't make any difference. It's just an index
of a certain kind of independence of convention. "I am my own
person." He's also a great bird watcher. He bought a house.
When he left here, he went to SUNY Stony Brook. He bought a
house there where there's lots of marshland. He seemed
something of a hermit at that time. I mean, not a real
hermit, but a private man. A social man, but somewhat shy. He
loved nature and he still does.

Another man was Werner Angress.
Lage: Tell me about Angress [at Berkeley, 1955-1963].

Schorske: Angress was not kept. Angress was somebody—this is very

import ant --who got his degree at Berkeley. Rarely did they
ever promote such a person. They wanted to prevent that kind
of in-growing which had been practiced to some degree here and
was an incubus in many universities all over the country, of
graduate schools in particular, to promote their own as against
getting people from elsewhere.

Lage: And it had been very strong here earlier.

Schorske: It had been strong. I don't know the history of it, but I have
been told that it was strong. Then they were tending to go the
other way. If a guy came from Berkeley, he wasn't going to get
a job here. If he got a job here, then it was doubtful that he
would get a promotion to tenure here.

Lage: So Angress came out of Berkeley?

Schorske: He came out of Berkeley. We were—and are—good friends. I
have some prejudice in his favor as a consequence. He was a
German refugee who never would have been a historian—assuming
that he could have escaped the Nazis — even in the USA were it
not for the G.I. Bill. He came to Wesleyan, where I taught
before I came to Berkeley. He was my student. I was not his
main professor at Wesleyan, but he was an able student and he

did research for me as an undergraduate; yet he was almost my
age.

He started a whole new life, deciding to go to college
after he finished with the army. He was in the 82nd Airborne,
if that means anything to you. He was a tough fighter. He was
a graduate student of Sontag's, and Sontag pushed very hard to
have him promoted. But Sontag's stock had fallen very low, and
for Sontag to promote somebody had come pretty close to the
kiss of death, although many people liked and appreciated
Angress .

Whatever the case, Angress did not get through to tenure,
and he went during my time. So I'm saying Stocking- -the people
who left at junior ranks before they got to the tenure bar, or
when they got to the tenure bar—the ones that I remember most
vividly--

Lage: Did Angress go on to do good work?

Schorske: Oh yes; he was an effective teacher at SUNY Stony Brook. After
a good book on communism in the early Weimar Republic, he
subsequently became a historian of modern German Jewry, part of
which he did out of his own biographical reminiscence as a boy
under Nazism. His wife had been a concentration camp inmate.
They were subsequently divorced. She has recently written a
marvelous book in German under her maiden name, Ruth Kliiger;
it's not in English yet. It's a memoir of her life as a child
under the Nazis, including her life in a concentration camp.
She taught in the German department here, and later in
Princeton and Irvine. They were an interesting couple.

Of the junior people who left here I thought Paxton,
Angress, and Stocking were in some sense losses, which doesn't
mean that I necessarily voted for them. I can't even remember
whether all of them came up for tenure (I do remember Angress 's
case). They were all good junior people who did not go up to
tenure.

Promoting to Tenure from within the Department

Schorske: The idea of building strength from the bottom was marvelous.
The strategy that Stampp, Sontag, et al. tended to use was to
bring people, many from Harvard, just when they were ripe for
tenure but faced difficulty in their university. Always
there's difficulty in going up the ladder. At Berkeley, one

could go up the ladder, but at Eastern Ivy there was no
presumption in the assistant professor's favor.

Lage: They didn't hire with the assumption that you would go up the
ladder.

Schorske: No, they didn't. They hired with the explicit statement: you
have to be aware you will not necessarily be able to remain
here as a tenured person. We at Berkeley did it the other way.
We didn't say you'll necessarily get tenure, but if you
perform, fine. Indeed the deck was so stacked that they would
hire people whose talent had become manifest in their first
book. They had a first-book policy, and those first books
often came in the middle or in the late part of their non
tenure position.

So the policy was built by my predecessors, or elders and
betters, to cream the market of people who were either in less
good universities as seen from here, with tenure, but young;
people who had shown their academic mettle in terms of their
publication; and people who were likely to be let out rather
than go up when the up-or-out policy was applied in major
places and especially Harvard. [Martin] Malia, Ruhn--these
were Harvard up-or-out characters. Landes came from Columbia.
I don't know what his fate would have been there. Bouwsma too
came, I believe, as a late assistant professor from Illinois.
All these were here when I arrived. Very rarely were people in
history hired at tenure in Berkeley when I arrived. You asked
me something about that question last time.

Lage: You were hired at tenure.
Schorske: I was hired at tenure.
Lage: So there were few of you?

Schorske: Yes. Hans Rosenberg was hired at tenure shortly before me.
There may be others, but that was not the way most of the
hiring was done. To appoint people at the end of their
assistant professorships with a promise of early tenure was a
great asset, in the sense that you got people on the cusp of
their creativity. You gave them a big boost by saying if you
come as an assistant professor, in the next year, two years,
whatever, you will be an associate professor with tenure; or
you come as an associate professor without tenure and you'll
soon be a tenured person. This was good for the ego and good
for the morale, and we had a great esprit de corps.

[Joe] Levenson is another name I haven't mentioned here,
but he's a person who was brought in, I believe, at non-tenure.
Then he passed over the bar and became a tenured professor.
Very important. We hired [Richard] Webster that way. I have a
whole list: [Gunther] Earth. [Roger] Hahn also came from
outside. But he went up the ladder here. Zelnik, Webster,
Levine, Jordan, Middlekauff--all these people came, if I
remember, in a non-tenured way, but often near tenure, where
you could see the quality because something had been documented
beyond the disseitation to show the quality. Zelnik came quite
young. It took him more time because his first book wasn't
out, I think.

I don't have all the details. I'm only trying to give you
a pattern, and those are a few of the names that I think of.
One person who had a Ph.D. from Berkeley who made it was John
Heilbron. He was a rare case. He was the only case that I can
identify- -but there may have been more, because I don't know
what happened in some other fields like Asian or Latin American
history. I'm not sure exactly at what rank Eric Gruen, our
very fine present Roman historian came from. But I think he
too had an initial non-tenured appointment.

Lage: But Heilbron is a Berkeley--

Schorske: Heilbron was a student of Kuhn's. Hahn came here, I think from
outside, but he was well known to Kuhn when he was hired. Of
course, Kuhn was building that part of the department pretty
much, and they got good people.

Lage: Was there a discussion about hiring a Berkeley Ph.D. when
Heilbron was hired [in 1967]?

Schorske: I don't remember it. In fact, his non-tenure appointment
wouldn't have made a problem; we could have hired him. We
wouldn't do it normally, but with a push you could do it. We
had others. There was Sam Haber in American history, who was a
student of Henry May's. He went through the department as a
non-tenured person and then he made it. I don't think I was
here when that happened, but I may have been. It wasn't close
to my field, so I didn't notice.

In any case, Heilbron was quickly recognized. He was in a
very tough part of the history of science, and he was
recognized for his quality. He was in my graduate seminar in
historiography, and I was impressed with his fine, sharp mind.
Incidentally, the grad students in the history of science were
among the most interesting in my historiography seminar.

Considerations in Hiring a Historian

Schorske :

Lage:
Schorske:

Lage:

Schorske:

Lage:

Schorske;

Lage:
Schorske:

I have one more thing that I would like to mention: the hiring
of a second colonial Americanist, in which I was involved. I
think I was chairman then, but if not, I was on the search
committee, which was as important in the hiring process—in
fact, more important than being chairman, because that's where
the real hunting went on.

We found three splendid candidates all proposed by one
single professor at Yale. That was Ed Morgan, who was one of
the best colonial historians in the country.

Was this to replace Bridenbaugh?

Yes, probably it was to replace Bridenbaugh. We already had, I
think, Winthrop Jordan, I'm not sure. He too subsequently
left.

He did.

Do you know where he went?

No. [Professor Jordan was hired in 1963 and left Berkeley in
1982, for the University of Mississippi.]

He came from Brown, I remember that. He came with a new
method, and he was a real pioneer in the colonial history of
the blacks. He wrote a marvelous book called White Over Black.
a path-breaking book. I don't ever feel he's gotten from the
profession the credit that he should have for that particular
piece of work.

They're still assigning that to students,
assigned in classes just recently.

My daughter had it

Oh good. Well, I'm very glad to hear it. Anyway, he was a
fine person. He was just very original. Then after
Bridenbaugh was leaving, I guess that's when it happened. We
went- -of course the usual combing the country; but our three
finalists were all students of a single professor, Edmund
Morgan at Yale. There was something about that. We had a very
hard time making this decision. Ed Morgan had, like any great
graduate teacher, a gift for eliciting the originality of his
students and fortifying with discipline their viewpoints,
however different from his own.

Lage: The hiring of Bob Middlekauff must have been the result of this
search.

Schorske: Yes, he was the result. But it was such a hard decision,
because different types of history were involved in this
decision. Perhaps it has to do with where we were at the time:
whether to strengthen social or cultural history. The decision
was made for somebody between the genres: Hiddlekauff was in
the history of Puritan education; that's what he was working on
at the time. His first book was on this. Excellent person.
He had the look of great solidity. But all three were just
very interesting.

Another who was considered was John Murrin, who ended up at
Princeton—one of the most thoughtful and wide-ranging
historians I have ever known. The third I cannot remember the
name of. Perhaps Ken Stampp or Henry May will know the name.
He was a radical historian, and he wrote his thesis and his
first book—which I think had not yet come out then—on the
merchant seamen in the American Revolution. Three wonderful
topics, three outstanding candidates.

Lage: How would you decide? How did the group decide?

Schorske: That was it: it was so hard. We had to make a recommendation.
I don't remember what our report said.

Lage: You read their work, I understand?

Schorske: We read the works. We always had to write a report. The

report was submitted in writing to the department, then as now,
and all the department members were supposed to read the works
themselves and see how they came out. We do the same thing at
Princeton, so it isn't as if Cal were the only place where that
went on. But I rarely remember a more difficult moment in the
committee than trying decide to whom to give preference. We
really did make the right choice from the point of view of
multiple talents. For Middlekauff turned out to be first rate
not only as an historian, but also as an administrator of the
department and the university, and then he went on to Pasadena
to the Huntington Library.

Lage: Did you make judgments about what kind of a citizen of the
community the person would be?

Schorske: We didn't focus on that as a priority. We always focused on

the scholarship. But then, of course, everybody had other fish
to fry someplace, and the problem—we agreed on that— was to
somehow keep the quality of the mind central. Now, the quality

of the mind is an elastic conception too. As for me, for
example, really it was very important what kind of teacher this
would be. Most people were interested in that, but some were
willing to overlook deficiency in that area if the scholarship
were adequate.

Lage: Did you have them come out a give a lecture at this stage, when
the choice was between the three of them?

Schorske: Yes. I don't remember if that was done with the three

colonialists, but those on the short list usually would give a
talk, The department would assemble with graduate students, as
I recall it, in the little Alumni House back here. I too had
to give a talk there when I was being considered, so that
everybody would have a chance to make a judgment. That's not
unique to Berkeley. But yes, we did do that. Then, of course,
some would be attracted to one candidate and some to another
and whatnot .

But in the end, when the department made a choice, I don't
myself remember ever going away feeling, what a God-awful
decision. I think we did pretty jolly well, on the whole.
What we did was not necessarily to achieve a uniquely high
ceiling but to establish a very high floor. I think that's
what good procedures do, if they're sustained by an academic
ethos of the kind I'm talking about: how good a mind is this?
If the mind is good, it can go in a lot of directions, and some
flaws may develop which are also related to being effective in
a department. But on the whole, if you keep the scholarly
criterion central, it saves trouble. It provides the basis for
a very wide tolerance; you don't get politics mixed up in it.

I don't care what kind of politics the historian has. One
should make one's judgment on how convincing is the way in
which evidences are put together to make meaning and to make
you feel, "Thus it is, thus it was, it could not be otherwise."
You don't have to share the presuppositions of the person to
see the work of thought and craftsmanship emergent. The
insight that comes from a set of premises that are different
from you own can often shake you up or shake the profession up
when it doesn't want to be shaken.

We're all conservatives in that sense. We don't want to be
disturbed in our ways of making meaning. Yet good departments
are built of different mental styles.

Women Faculty and Crad Students, and an Aside on Raymond Sontag

Lage : I'm wondering about women. How many women came into this
process of being considered, let alone being hired?

Schorske: Firstly, they didn't come in to be considered. That they were
not was not only our fault. That was the fault of the whole
mind-set of the country. I do not Just single out the Berkeley
department. We had one woman, Adrienne Koch. She had a hell
of a time. She was defended by the only person who's always
regarded as the right-winger of the department, namely, Raymond
Sontag, about which judgment much can be said. He was right-
wing on the Vietnam War, but he had a long history of being
otherwise, including for the fight at Princeton whence he came
to Berkeley, to get Jews admitted to the faculty. He's also
charged with being anti-Semitic. Another piece, I think, of
errant nonsense. He may have had some residual anti-Semitism
which was so widespread in America, Protestant, Catholic,
whatever—in the Christian community- -but I--

Lage: You don't think it affected his judgment?

Schorske: I think it could have. It could have affected his judgment,
and other people may have cases. The charge is so often made
that I can't read it out. But it was not my experience. When
I was at Wesleyan, we hired David Abosh, one of the people whom
he was closest to, in Japanese history. He was recommended by
his teacher, Joe Levenson, and also equally enthusiastically by
Sontag. He was not just Jewish, but a certain kind of
stereotypically Brooklyn Jewish, as defined by some anti-
Semites. He was an excellent teacher, and so he was good for
what we wanted. He was always favored by Sontag.

Lage: And Angress as well, you say?

Schcrske: Angress, of course. The biggest defeat Sontag had in my time
was over Angress 's promotion. Anti-Semitism played no role
whatsoever in the discussion. David Landes, who was himself
Jewish, opposed the promotion. I'll never forget the line he
used of Angress in the discussion: that he was too much
concerned "with the care and feeding of students."

Lage: Who said that?

Schorske: David Landes.

Lage: He said that about Sontag?

Schorske: No. About Angress. And Angress was a good teacher. He was

maybe not a world beater, but he was certainly concerned about
the care and feeding of students. Landes was saying a true
thing. But in his mouth, it was another way of saying he
doesn't put enough into his scholarship, which wasn't really
the case, as the event proved in his subsequent history. He
went to SUNY Stony Brook, where he continued to be a productive
scholar.

Lage : And the women?

Schorske: The women weren't in it. Adrienne Koch was the only woman in
the department, and she had a mighty hard time. I never quite
caught up with why, but she somehow was aligned with the Sontag
old guard. Sontag had become, by the time I arrived, the
leader of the remnants of the old guard, whom Brucker describes
in his essay.1 Sontag had been, on the one hand, a pioneer in
bringing new people, but he also had a kind of patriarchal
politics running which included, however it happened, Adrienne
Koch, a woman. I don't know enough about her scholarly
quality. She was said to be difficult to get on with. I
didn't know her well enough to make that judgment.

Lage: But did you think at the time, or was there awareness, "Why
don't we have more women at the table here with us?"

Schorske: No, no. It was a totally male-dominated profession and we

simply didn't question it. Let's be clear about this. If we
go shopping for faculty, either we go for finished books or
through the old-boy network. If a woman wrote the finished
book, you might consider her. Maybe that's how Adrienne Koch
got here for all I know. Somebody might consider her. But
usually, somebody else would say, "She's a young woman, she's
going to get married, she'll never play a role. Why waste the
time?" That real deep-seated male chauvinism was regnant in
the entire society, except in certain professions like nursing
and teaching.

Lage: And probably in the encouragement of graduate students as well.

Schorske: Well, now you're getting down to the cases. One of my great
awakenings at Berkeley came from having graduate students,
including women, for the first time. I hadn't had any when I
taught at Wesleyan. But then I realized that women were

'Gene Brucker, "History at Berkeley," in History at Berkeley: A Dialog
in Three Parts (Center for Studies in Higher Education, UC Berkeley, 1998)
1-22.

especially suited to build my field, intellectual history, when
I was trying to get people to open up to be intellectual
historians in any aspect of culture. Especially in the arts
and literature, women had majored as undergraduates. They
would come as graduate students open to using artistic
materials in becoming historians.

My then opinion, my pop sociology, with a male chauvinistic
twist if you like, was that women had a choice of options: they
could be serious historians; they had certain independence
lacking to men, for they had an anchor to windward, because
they could always get married if it didn't work. In that
sense, I say with a male chauvinist twist, because my
assumptions about a woman's career was that marriage was a big
draw, that's where they would usually end up. And maybe it
wasn't worth the time for them to take up a career—but looking
at their performance as students--

Lage : These are the things that you brought — the cultural baggage you
brought to your considerations?

Schorske: The women were good because they were daring. They could and
often did take intellectual risks more easily than men. They
were good because they were interested in and prepared to
consider and work on new subjects that had not been considered
subjects, especially the artistic elements in historical life.
The same kind of thing went on with social history with the
great team of Stampp, Levine, Leon Litwack: bringing race and
color into the thing. Jordan has to be added. So we had
something going here in the American field, and 1 felt we had a
big thing going in the intellectual history field, to which
women could bring a special talent. But I never thought of
women's history as a subject.

It turned out, in my experience in seminars, including
undergraduate seminars, the 201 's we used to--

Lage : 103 was the undergraduate seminar.

Schorske: 103' s, yes. Those were established while I was here, and that
was a great progress in teaching-through-research, offered by
the department. But you felt that the women came into graduate
work: there's a lot of talent being missed because they're not
included. This was my reaction. So we certainly did not say,
as we were later rightly compelled to say, every time you make
an appointment you ask yourself, "Is there a woman out there?"
But the idea dawned on me in teaching women students. It was
the feminist movement that breathed life into the question.

Lage: Did this happen while you were at Berkeley, or later on at
Princeton?

Schorske: The mandate only came, I think, after I left. I would have to
reconstruct it.

Lage: The real mandate.

Schorske: I was in on the making of that mandate for the American
Historical Association. 1 was on the committee that was
appointed by the Council to study the place of women in the
history profession. How to enlarge the pool: that was the
problem. It was a deep-running study. We compiled files, we
asked departments for records on their graduate students: what
was their destiny, how many women were there, what was the
fellowship distribution? This was a big deal. We established
a special office in the American Historical Association that
was manned by a person who became a great friend of mine and
later a Princeton colleague, Dorothy Ross. She's now a leading
scholar in the history of American social science and teaches
at Johns Hopkins .

Lage: Was that in the seventies?

Schorske: No; I think it was in the late sixties. It was called the

Willie Lee Rose committee. That was the name of the chairman.
Hannah Gray and I drafted the report. It was one of the best
committees I was ever on. We had three women and two men;
hard-working, and we really accomplished a lot.

Lage: Do you think it had an impact?

Schorske: I know it had an impact. It wouldn't have had any if the women
hadn't stirred themselves, let me assure you. The women's
movement was on. It was the most powerful residue of all the
sixties uproar. Not just locally, I'm talking nationally here.
And not just in the academy, but across the board, the
resolution grew to do something about the place of women.

But it hadn't been in my consciousness before, nor in that
of any of my department colleagues to do anything about this
until we got the push from the powerful social movement. And
then some went into this, others went into the racial minority
problem, different people really fanned out; some became
resistant. But the resistance was very quiet and weak, because
we were in an era in which democracy was on the march, so doing
something about palpable injustices was something that was
politically correct, and it was damn hard to be politically
incorrect. However you may not have wished to have women

coming into the academy and so on, you didn't have the nerve to
say it.

So it was the conservatives who were on the defensive
instead of the radicals as so often happens. The resistances
could be there, but they were weakest in the academy. One
thing has to be said for academic culture: we are somewhat
descendants of medieval clerics. We have inherited an ethical
role. It isn't just an intellectual ethos, as I have argued
before; somehow we ought to be measured ethically in our
deportment the way ministers are supposed to be: good boys, not
have too many flings, et cetera. Well, maybe the academy's
code has loosened up sexually, but still somewhere or other the
social code of behavior that is imposed on the academic is
stronger than that on most professions.

Religious and Cultural Diversity and Prejudices, in Society and
on Campus

Schorske: When I came to this campus today, and my wife and I walked

around for three quarters of an hour, just the sight of who was
here! This is another one of David Bellinger's questions: the
ethnic mix. The incredible result, the student racial mix,
goes back also to very unpleasant uprisings, the campus Third
World conflicts. All of these unruly things that were so
feared and resisted — and often rightly in terms of their
methods — let me tell you, they made major contributions to
loosening up both the university and the society, to make it
clear that people who had been shut out had to be taken in,
that it had to become more inclusive. Now you walk around the
campus--! can hardly believe my eyes. I think I had one Korean
student and two black students in all my years at Berkeley.
I'm talking about my undergraduate course, with 150, 200
people! They still don't come to study European history if
they're black. I hope they will more and more. I just had
lunch with two art historians, and they told me they are
beginning to get people who are coming into art history now.
More than beginning: they have quite a few Asians in European
art history. To recruit women, of course, is not a problem in
European art history. Once you open the sluice gates there,
it's easy to get the recruits. History is a little harder.
Physics is very hard, and so on. You know the roster. These
things come slowly, but my God, when I think it's only thirty
years, more or less, since this began; the change is Just
unbelievable.

Lage: It is amazing. I think people do forget that some of it grew
out of this very unpleasant unrest.

Schorske: Exactly. It was such a mean business for everybody at some
point. Nevertheless, there was a real pay-off. What stayed
was the best part of it: the work on issues of social justice.
The demand for intellectual reform next; not that strong, but
some for educational reform, some that also produced results.

Changes in the topics on which people worked [referring to
interview outline] --good results, but also sometimes terrible,
because to me there is so much present-ism in history today.
That's another subject.

Lage: Do you have any reflections on divisions within the department
that were based on class or ethnicity? Gender not really,
because you only had the one woman.

Schorske: Religion?

Lage: Religion—we talked about anti-Semitism last time, and you
talked about Catholicism.

Schorske: I ought to begin by saying if you mean in the faculty of the
history department—are you talking about the faculty?

Lage: Yes, the faculty. I'm thinking about the younger generation of
historians, the ones that Carl Bridenbaugh objected to and
said, "Children of immigrants can't really write about American
history."

Schorske: If you ask, What was Carl Bridenbaugh' s practice?, please check
it out with Ken Stampp and Henry May. I can't believe that
Carl Bridenbaugh in his class, and especially in his graduate
classes which counted for him much more than anything else he
did, that he would, in fact, block somebody who had the wrong
ethnicity or the wrong class. How much he would do for gender,
I don't know. When he made that ugly remark at the AHA- -and I
remember it, I was there when it happened- -it was a shocker.

Lage: It was a formal speech.

Schorske: Yes, it was a presidential address directed, as everybody knew,
at Oscar Handlin of Harvard University.

Lage: It was directed at a particular person?

Schorske: Yes, who was writing a new kind of immigrant history, who was
involved in it by his heavy stress on ethnic immigrants. He

Lage:

Schorske :

Lage:
Schorske:

Lage:
Schorske :

Lage:

was a pioneer in the same way that Stampp was a pioneer with
the enslaved blacks. Handlin didn't happen to work with the
blacks, he worked with the people who came to Ellis Island. He
stressed the less "acceptable" ethnics—Irish, Jews, southern
Europeans. He oddly omitted the Scandinavians. One of the
important negative reviews of Oscar was written by a Swedish-
American.

Lawrence Levine has written about the impact of Bridenbaugh's
speech on him as a young person coming into history. I was
thinking when somebody like him or like Reggie Zelnik, who came
from the East and an immigrant background, were they fully
accepted into this department?

I think they were completely accepted. I'm sure they were
accepted. I'm sure that among the people who accepted them
would have been Carl Bridenbaugh. I would be stunned if it
were not the case. The only case I've ever seen of Bridenbaugh
really losing his marbles was over this Kuhn/Dupree debacle,
which I certainly can't blame on Dupree; there was perhaps some
racist uncertainty on the part of Bridenbaugh that blinded him
so to this problem, or maybe he had something about Jews. But
my God, it didn't--

You didn't pick it up, it sounds like.

I couldn't pick it up. I present myself as a Jew myself. I
never felt anything like that. I think when you're half Jewish
as I am, your highest sensitivity is toward anti-Semitism. You
feel more Jewish in the face of an anti-Semite than you ever
feel otherwise. In my case, I didn't know anything about
Judaism culturally; you have to learn as an adult what your
heritage is. But your sensitivity is plenty high, and I never

felt it from him or anybody else in the department,
stunned with this idea.

I'm

Ethnicity: Now, whether we would go for people [to hire)
deliberately to rectify a wrong of exclusion? I do not believe
we did. No more than for women.

That wasn't the temper of the times.

When I think of the enthusiasm Bridenbaugh had for bringing
Rosenberg to the campus, for example. What for? If he were
xenophobic, anti-Semitic—what ' s Rosenberg doing here?

So you think his speech was focused on Oscar Handlin and the
kind of history he was writing?

Schorske: I'm not really qualified to say. I know that his animus

against Handlin was enormous, but nobody would have allowed his
animus to run away with him in such a crazy way if there
weren't more to it than Just Handlin. Let me leave it at that.
All 1 can say is that I don't think, even if he had residual
anti-Semitism, of which there is a lot around in any gentile
community, there is no way around it--.

And incidentally, the reverse is also true. You ought to
read the festschrift for Levenson as a final chapter. It's
called The Mozartian Historian.2 It's a beautiful festschrift.

Anyway, Levenson wrote something on his view of
Christianity which is savagely prejudiced, J mean,
unbelievable. That is not the way he deported himself in the
department. No way. We hired several Catholics with
Levenson 's support. In the American academic establishment,
Jews were hired earlier than Catholics. Jew first, then
Catholics, then women, then blacks; thus you go "down" the
ladder to overcome prejudice. I'm being a little too
schematic, but nevertheless, there's something to be said for
watching these priorities. Where does prejudice get broken
through?

The stronger you have a commitment that is professional,
focusing on the quality of work, the less whatever social
prejudice exists is able to operate successfully.
Professionalism militates against this prejudice, which doesn't
mean that the template of a religiously or ideologically formed
orientation disappears from the landscape. We all remain
prisoners of what our religious and cultural heritages are, and
they will come into play somewhere along the line. Even in
personal matters, we have to be really on our guard against
that.

But the department didn't suffer from these things except
to the degree that the society suffered. So if I looked at the
department--

Lage: In asking this question, I wasn't implying that they did. I
Just wanted you to reflect.

Schorske: Okay. I'm giving you some reflections. Let me make a general
reflection about California. My wife is Catholic, and I'm a

Maurice Meisner and Rhoads Murphy (editors), The Mozartian Historian;
Essays on the Works of Joseph R. Levenson (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1976).

half -Jew, reared by a family as a "free thinker" and agnostic,
as I explained to you. When we came here, especially the
Catholic problem was still alive, very much alive in the
academic world of America. In my graduate school class in
Harvard, people who went into history and who were Catholic, if
they were faithful to their creed, they had only one
possibility of employment, which was to get to a Catholic
institution. They could go to Notre Dame--

Lage: They weren't hired by the major universities?

Schorske: No. They're weren't hired here in the humanities either, 1
imagine. Sontag was a breakthrough, and he was hired from
Princeton. He was a Catholic. I think he was converted while
he was at Princeton; I'm not sure about that. He was an
Illinois boy. But the fact of the matter is that when I
entered grad school in the 1930s Protestants and liberals had
less of a prejudice against Jews than they had against
Catholics. Catholics were seen as saddled with a creed, like
Marxists.

Lage: Like a Communist.

Schorske: Right, like a Communist. They had a mindset, and they were

also seen as being under authority. So if the pope said this
was the party line, you distort the history, or you don't come
out with the full truth, or your vision is skewed. Of course,
there are situations in which it's true that your vision is
skewed, but so is the guy's who's making the accusation. So to
break through: that is the problem.

Lage: Now, you were saying that California was--

Schorske: When we came here, we were stunned by the good relations

between Catholics and Protestants in California society as a
whole, not just in the university. The university itself was
very laic, this place. There had been a huge wall built by the
university's original founders against religious intrusion into
the academy and against political intrusion into the academy.
That's why the Regents exist: to protect the university. It
would have been easy to turn that around.

During the FSM time, as during the oath time before it, it
was very easy to turn that supposed protective wall into
actually an invasion of the university by the right wing in the
society. As far as I know, that never turned out to be the
case with religion; although Bill Bouwsma, who has followed its
place in the university, could give you another story. I hope
he's on your interview list.

Lage: He's on our list. We haven't gotten to him, but I think he's
next.

Schorske: Henry May is another good informant. These are religiously

very sensitive people. Of course, Robert Brentano, a Catholic
--he's another person who could talk about it.

Social Diversity at Berkeley in the Sixties

Schorske: I want to say one more thing about your suggested categories:
"Reflections on divisions, based on class, ethnicity, gender,
religion, in the history department, UC, or academia in
general" [from the outline]. I want to say that these
categories do not exhaust what 1 felt when I came here. These
are contemporary categories with which David Hollinger is now
rightly concerned: class, ethnicity, gender, religion. That's
the name of the game today. And as far as I'm concerned, it
blocks historical reconstruction in some cases, and this is
one. When I came to this campus, what 1 was snowed by was a
foretaste of what I am snowed by even more today; namely, the
variety of social subgroups. You could tell it by their
clothing. But the variety then was within an overwhelmingly
white students population.

The kids from the [Central] Valley, many of whom were in
the fraternities, in informal sports clothes; people in the
elite, many of whom were also in some of the tonier
fraternities and sororities dressed accordingly. Urban
bohemians. The way people dressed in class was different.
Some of them had jackets, some had shirts with ties, others
none of these. Unlike the Eastern colleges I knew, there was
no uniform style of dress. Beginning with FSM, all these
symbols started to evaporate.

Schorske: But I had never encountered the visible presence of multiple
social subgroups in the classroom to such a high degree.

Lage: You could see it in their papers?

Schorske: I don't want to say I could identify papers sociologically by
type, but there was something in the intellectual quality- -not
so much quality, as timbre, the kind of tonality that was
generated by the multiplicity of social subgroups. Ren Stampp,
who had Wisconsin in his background, might have had all this

experience, or David Hollinger, who has taught at Buffalo and
Michigan. They might be able to tell you of the same thing
there in those days. Well, David would be a little young--

Lage: But you came from a different--

Schorske: But I came from the East. So even the university from which I
came, Wesleyan, had social lamination, but its palpable
presence was always attenuated by a common college-boy style:
everybody dressed alike, et cetera. Here it wasn't so. And
the students didn't live alike. Some lived in private digs;
some were shacked up, some were not; some were in the
fraternity houses; some were in the dormitories. Berkeley was
the nearest thing in America to a university in Europe, a
Continental university, that I had ever seen.

Most American universities are a mix between Continental
and English models. But when it comes to housing, the English
model prevails in the housing of students. Our colleges are
built somewhere on the idea that a university is a community;
somewhere, a family in loco parentis. Perhaps Cal never had
that concept. Not in my time, and not, I think, before.

Lage : Even less, because they didn't have the dorms.

Schorske: Right. So this quality, of being urban and suburban and rural,
that's Social Diversity with a capital D, even though basically
it involved only whites. To be sure, it already included women
in the student body. It was a rich mix. Now you can look at
it with racial physiognomy in your field of vision, but not
then.

Lage: But you still had diversity.

Schorske: The diversity was already there, and the subcultures and their
power was one of the great interests to me in this university.

Lage: That's very exciting. That aspect was left out of my question
for sure.

Thomas Kuhn: A Historian and Philosopher of Science

Lage: Do you want to say more about Thomas Kuhn--from your knowing
him well as a person and as an historian—that might interest
historians of the history of science?

Schorske: Yes. I understand. I would say the most interesting thing

about Thomas Kuhn as an historian to me then was his struggle
to be both a philosopher and an historian. This is oil and
water; these do not mix. As Jacob Burckhardt said, "Philosophy
subordinates; history coordinates." And those two forms of
understanding do not mix well.

Lage: Why did he want to bring them together?

Schorske: Because science is closely tied to philosophy, yet philosophy
can be seen as a historical phenomenon. Science, and
especially physics, which was his major concern, is deeply
dependent upon mathematics. Mathematics is a purely logical
system. Even if you go over into the empirical, as you do with
physics, you have to consider the validity of logical
judgments, logical procedures. Kuhn was deeply aware of the
philosophical dimension of physical science, and especially
modern physical science. When modern philosophy was broken
open in the early twentieth century, the great break that came
--the next break after Hegel, let's say--came from the
relationship between mathematics, logic, and science, but
especially mathematics and logic. So to be a mathematical
logician, or something like that, was deeply a part of the
game. To understand the history of science, one must
understand the philosophical component of science.

[Another reason for Ruhn's focus on philosophy, I believe,
derived from his concentration on the problem of the relation
between innovation and demonstration in science.
Demonstration, proof, is essential to the acceptance of a new
insight. The insight is individual, but the system of
demonstration is social, a matter of historical consensus. It
is therefore influenced by history in the larger sense. Kuhn's
great gift was to show the structural coherence of science in
its philosophic aspect (as a system of demonstration) as
historically discontinuous. This is hard for philosophers--
especially Anglo-Saxon analytic ones with their a-historical
orientation--to accept. Tom affirmed philosophy more than ever
as the central intellectual context of science, but insisted on
the mutable, disjunctive character of philosophy itself, thus
subjecting it to history. Both philosophers and scientists
resisted Tom's structural sociology of the history of science,
for he robbed both science and philosophy of their autonomy as
truth-systems. Tom respected and admired philosophy, but when
the chips were down, he saw himself as a historian first,
--added by Professor Schorske during editing.]

All I want to say is that there are many reasons for Tom
Kuhn not getting on with different people in whatever

departments, but in philosophy he had a lot of trouble at
Berkeley. He wanted to be accepted in their ranks full-scale
at the same time as in history, but at least he saw philosophy
as a historical phenomenon, while history was not for him a
philosophical one.

Lage: So he wanted to work as a philosopher, not just as an historian
of philosophy?

Schorske: I think he aspired to that, but I am not sure. I believe that
the history of science held primacy for him; he never departed
a jot or tittle from that major priority. Science, however, is
conceived and practiced in a philosophical frame. The
protocols of proof, although they may change, are philosophical
in substance. This is important to Kuhn's whole position.
Hence historians of science must understand its philosophical
matrix. Hence, Kuhn felt that his students should come from
both philosophy and history.

We shared a conviction in this, because my idea of real
graduate teaching in intellectual history is that you have in
your classes people whose major commitment may not even be in
history; their major commitment may be in another field-
whatever, the arts, science. They should learn to historicize
their field from you, but you and other students of history
must learn the virtues and rigor of the other discipline's
special analytic from them. Thus you should welcome the
others, and you should send your graduate students to study in
seminars of the subjects which they wish to pursue as
intellectual historians.

For as a historian, you are never going to give the student
the fullness of analytic training that a person needs to do any
given area of thought. Therefore, get you to the philosophy
department, if that's your interest. Or get you to the art
history department. Go to the literature department. Wherever
it is. If you want to be an intellectual historian who
concentrates on one of these subjects, take graduate training
in them, and take into yourself the tension between the
analytic and the historian.

Lage: Did the philosophy department not want to give his students--

Schorske: I feel not, but I have nothing but Tom Kuhn's end of the

discussion. Tom Kuhn, as everybody knows, was a man with very
strong emotions about his own relations with other persons and
other fields as well. He intellectualized a lot, but he also
had a lot of personal, emotional input. So the sense that I
have of his rejection comes from him. I do not have it from

the philosophers — it's unimaginable to me that a person like
Searle would have rejected Tom Kuhn. I can't believe it. Nor
did Tom tell me that; but he certainly made clear that [Paul
K.) Feyerabend was a tremendous thorn in his side; a
distinguished philosopher of science. Why they didn't get on,
I have no idea, for I have not read their public disputations.

Lage: So that was part of his unhappiness with Berkeley? [The

Department of Philosophy did not renew Kuhn's appointment in
philosophy in 1961.)

Schorske: That was part of his unhappiness. On the whole he was very

happy with the history department. But then, when all the fuss
came about his promotion, of course it was a great blow to him
that here was this attempt at blocking his path, and so on. It
shouldn't have been a great blow because he had practically the
whole department on his side, and the administration too.

Then came the opportunity at Princeton: to shape an
independent program in the history and philosophy of science,
with faculty and students from both disciplines and firm
support in both departments. Charles Gillispie, Princeton's
fine historian of eighteenth to nineteenth century science,
armed with an invitation from Harvard, elicited from
Princeton's administration support to invite Kuhn to build such
a program with him. The temptation for Tom was overwhelmingly
strong. And indeed, the two scholars, though profoundly
different in personality and intellectual style, worked
beautifully together to build a powerful program in conformity
with Tom's ideals that had been frustrated at Berkeley.

One of the people we didn't hire when we took Hahn was
Jerry Geison, who's in the history of biology and has recently
written a very interesting and controversial book about
Pasteur. He was at Princeton, or soon to come there.

Lage : So it was strength at Princeton that led Ruhn to leave
Berkeley?

Schorske: It was strength at Princeton and the willingness of the

administration there to go to bat and make good terms. When
people are discontent, they are very open to the generosity of
the offers they receive. When they are very happy, they are
more likely to find flaws in offers from outside. Tom was
unhappy. He was unhappy in this situation: "I can't go
further." There may also be deep emotional reasons that
transcend these institutional ones, but I don't know them.
Surely the move to Princeton placed severe strain on his
marriage.

Lage: But aside from why he left Berkeley, are there other things to
note from knowing him at Princeton about the quality of his
mind or the way he approached his work?

Schorske: Let me tell you this. In the first place, David Bellinger's
question about whether we recognized Kuhn's exceptional
qualities has to do with the fact that, as he has pointed out
in a recent Daedalus issue [Winter 1997], Ruhn is now a major
figure. Within the last two decades of his life, Kuhn's
influence began to travel from one field to another. Bellinger
was one of the first to recognize it; he wrote a brilliant
article on Kuhn and the implications of his work for history.
On the other hand, I think he has in this other question- -

Lage: These aren't necessarily David's questions [on the interview
outline], I have to say. I Just took his suggestions, and
other reflections, and came up with a few things here.

Schorske: Oh, I see.

Lage: I don't want to make him responsible for this line of
questioning.

Schorske: I feel that when you are working with your colleagues, you do
not know who will turn out to be the stars. You can really
tell who's damn good; that's not hard. You can tell the wheat
from the chaff. But when it comes to knowing who is going to
be a truly major figure and an overriding influence, and why
he/she will be so, that is much more problematic. It takes
time. Great mistakes might be made by the general public,
because they latch onto a phrase, and then in another ten years
the phrase may get watered down—like Kuhn's "paradigm"--and
finally fade away, and with it the reputation of a person who
should have a much bigger reputation than he has when he got
popularized around a phrase. So there are these problems. My
feeling is that, like others, I identified Kuhn as one of the
really interesting people in the department, but not more. I
have to add that my list of interesting minds in the department
was pretty long; I could give you seven or eight names at
least.

Then, if I start to add friends of Kuhn's and mine, like
Stanley Cavell--there were at Berkeley other people of
exceptional originality in the cultural sciences: Joseph Kerman
in music, for instance. I can go on with a pretty long roster
of people of our generation, roughly. I think I was probably
ten years older than Kuhn--but here we were in the same
generation basically. There were a lot of wonderful people on

this campus. If I had been asked in 1965 or '67, who's going
to be the blockbuster in all this crowd, I don't know what I
would have said.

I would have said of Joseph Kerman, he's a sure thing,
because he wrote one book that was so smashing. I assigned it
in the course you took: Opera as Drama.3 1 thought it was
really a milestone in the understanding of musicology. But I
wouldn't have been able to make the judgment about Cavell, or
about Kuhn . About Henry May I was pretty sure, when his major
book came out on the pre-World War I period.

Lage: Innocence; American Innocence?

Schorske: The End of American Innocence.4 I thought that looked like a
winner. There are judgments you make like that. Joseph
Levenson's Confucian China and Its Modern Fate was another
instance for me.5 Then you say, "Well, on the basis of this,
this is a really good historian. This is top-drawer stuff," or
a good philosopher or whatever. But I couldn't do that with
Kuhn; his path-breaking book had not yet been published, and I
might not have recognized its revolutionary import.6

But I thought he was fascinating and a great interlocutor.
He taught me more about conducting intellectual history in our
anti-historical age than any other historian except Leonard
Krieger. Both wrestled with the problem of doing history in
relation to a-historical analytic models. That's my problem.
That may have been my research problem ever since I began to
get involved in Vienna.

Lage: And that was something that you would feed back and forth with
Kuhn?

Schorske: Yes, indeed. And in which his example of wishing to be

philosopher and historian when they don't mix in order to do
something else, which is history of science, as I wanted to do
history of art, history of this, history of that, and put them

'Joseph Kerman, Opera as Drama (New York: Knopf, 1956).

*Henry F. May, The End of American Innocence: A Study of the First
Years of Our Time. 1912-1917 (New York: Knopf, 1959).

Moseph R. Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate: A Trilogy
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968).

'Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of the Scientific Revolution (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1962).

all on a social platform. He and 1 had a somewhat different
agenda, but 1 felt he had taken the hardest problem of all:
hard in its ultimate substance, namely, modern physics; hard in
the non-miscibility of philosophy and history as modes of
thinking. So for the will to bite the bullet, I found him
inspiring. That's all.

Lage: Wonderful.

Schorr.ke: But not the findings. Was he going to be the great man of our
generation? I had no idea, because I had too little ability to
understand, let alone judge, in science.

Lage: That's asking a lot of people, to look to the future in that
way.

Carl Schorske, 1966.

Photo courtesy Time magazine,
from the cover of the April 1966 issue.

IV MORE REFLECTIONS ON THE FREE SPEECH MOVEMENT
Maintaining Freedom of Thought in a Public University

Lage: Now, let's see. We dealt with the Free Speech Movement
somewhat cursorily at our interview in May. I'd like to
discuss it more fully, but I don't want to go into the details
that must be very fuzzy in your mind. I can't imagine that you
remember week by week what happened, even with the chronology I
sent to you. I ask here [on the interview outline]: It would
be good to have a clearer statement of your own position.
Well, earlier today, you made the statement about no police
dealing with the students. That might be —

Schorske: That is a strategic position. That's very easy. But I think

my general position came from wrestling with the problem of how
does the republic of letters relate to the civil society. That
was the big problem which I had not had to face in force until
I came to Berkeley, because Berkeley had had to face it in
force in the early fifties. I had already begun to taste it at
Wesleyan in the McCarthy era. It was a general problem.

When I came to Berkeley, a renewed privately funded anti-
communist crusade was reviving the issue of the oath
controversy on the campus in another form. Much of the public
and the powerful conservative forces in California suspected
that the university was "red" and so on. All the things that
[Richard] Hofstadter and others worried about in the American
illiberal, anti-intellectual tradition surfaced and gained new
salience. But the problem that came to occupy me was the
relation between the standards of the university and the
standards of civil society: where do they meet, how do they
mix? My positions—and I have to use the plural—revolved
around that. I felt that it was the responsibility of the
university to defend to the death its own autonomy, and for
that, the medieval university was the model. I began to think
and talk about that , and the department too became involved in
these issues before FSM, as I told you last time.

So the conceptual frame with the difficulties inherent in
maintaining, at the same time, the fact that the university is
an institution with civic responsibility, and yet an
institution which, for its primary pursuit, that of learning,
oust maintain its special absolute standards, which include
free thought and speech, the acceptance of ideas from any
element in society no matter how hated by our world, and has to
do that as a state university; I thought that was absolutely
fundamental. So all my positions are always related to this.

Opposing Centralization; The Byrne Report

Schorske: In the course of defending the positions of principle adopted
by the senate on December 8, 1964, the structure of the
university also came into question. It led to an examination
of the position of Berkeley in the University of California
system. I became a foe, as did many people here, of the degree
of centralization, because centralization made it hard for
Berkeley to maintain its position in the crisis. We had people
on the other campuses who believed with us as a general
faculty--! don't want now to get into the divisions—and who
believed in the cause of free speech we were defending,
expressed in the Academic Senate positions. I'm not talking
about extreme student positions or the later Third World
positions; I'm talking about actions by the Berkeley senate,
about our institutional self-government and on what principles.
We had our allies, but we also had our opponents everywhere.

Lage: On the other campuses, are you saying?

Schorske: On the other campuses. One of the methods of the central

administration in trying to control Berkeley's actions under
pressure from the Regents was to employ the institutions of
centralization. Clark Kerr's institutional plans had had two
sides: one was the construction of new campuses, of which each
would develop its own special character. The other was to
develop statewide institutions that would keep a uniformity of
standards, but also limit campus autonomy through central
control.

Academically, under normal conditions, it made sense to
strengthen the other campuses, even though that meant
containing Berkeley's resources in favor of the other campuses.
In fact, Berkeley was primus inter pares. In the crisis, the
other campuses felt that they should not be dragged down by
what they saw as the misbehaviors of Berkeley—understood; but

also, there was a tendency then for the others to be complicit
with the majority of the Regents in curbing Berkeley in a way
that Berkeley could not and would not accept.

Lage: The action was here on the campus.

Schorske: Right, the action, but not only that, the mentality that

sustained the push for free speech and the right of social
protest was here on the campus. We had already accepted into
our body social a social mix which involved another kind of
engagement with the society from the kind that believes that
what we should produce are only docile people who will go out
and occupy the positions that the elite offers them in the
society. We had long abandoned that position, which largely
prevailed on all the other campuses. We were already a great
university in the most supercharged social climate in the
nation in an urban scene where we had in our body social all
the currents that were causing havoc throughout the nation.

We were volatile because we were an institution so
representative of the society of California, even if the
proportion in which its social elements were present here was
different from that of the state.

Lage: Ours was volatile?

Schorske: Yes, volatile. It was the most volatile corner of the country
then. The most powerful, the most energetic, the most forward-
looking, and the most explosive all at once. We were in the
middle of it, not the other campuses. They were not. They had
a different agenda. So I became very committed to the idea of
decentralization, that there would be a university at Berkeley
with the autonomy to sustain its special character.

Lage: Did you have encounters with other figures on other campuses?
Schorske: Yes. I was involved with Byrne.
Lage: Jerome Byrne--?

Schorske: Jerome Byrne in Los Angeles in 1965. I spent quite a lot of

time working with that group, and they came up with a plan that
was altogether to my liking.1

Lage: For more decentralization.

'Report on the University of California and Recommendations to the
Special Committee of the Regents, by Jerome C. Byrne. May 7, 1965.

Schorske: Much more decentralization. So we wanted to see the system
loosened, each campus with its own budget not decided on or
recommended by the central authority, but recommended by each
campus to do its own thing. There was a lot of illusion in all
this, no question. One of the things that a revolution does is
it incites creativity, but at the same time, it incites
illusions, it inspires illusions. I don't want to exempt
myself from being prey to that.

It also incites tremendous anxieties. I felt them, and my
colleagues felt them right, left, and center. But in that, you
try to steer to find the via media which will give you some
kind of locus standi to preserve what you most value. The
position for me was that the university must take the social
tensions into the bosom of the university and intellectualize
them. To do that, you have to defend your status as a
university, that is, as an intellectual, professional affair
about which the outer world cannot impose its religion, its
politics, its exclusivist ideology and practices, right, left
or center.

Lage: Its police.

Schorske: Then the battle's lost, when the police come.

Lage: Did you have experiences with faculty on other campuses that
encouraged you in this idea that the other campuses were more
conservative?

Schorske: I had it more than most faculty because I was involved

institutionally with the Emergency Executive Committee, a very
short-lived organization. It's amazing to me how much it's
forgotten.

Lage: It was just a few months.

Schorske: Six months. It functioned from just after December 8, 1964,
through the [Acting Chancellor Martin] Meyerson regime until
Roger Heyns became chancellor. Some of the people who were in
it ended up in the Heyns administration. But never mind that.
In the very short time that I was involved with it, we had
first to put over with the Regents the December 8th
Resolutions, which were a faculty-voted thing. We got from
[President] Clark Kerr agreement for us to go to the Regents'
meeting in Los Angeles and try to do that. In that connection,
I had some contact with faculty on other campuses, but not
much; I didn't know many people.

Lage:

On these other campuses?

Schorske: No. I knew few. The Emergency Executive Committee had a

meeting with the very competent chancellor of UCLA, a medical
doctor. I don't remember his name.

Lage: Was it [Franklin] Murphy?

Schorske: Murphy, sure. He was the man. A very skillful administrator
and very adroit in this situation. He never was an overt foe
of Berkeley, but he was ready to fish in the troubled waters.

Lage: He was a big supporter of UCLA, however.

Schorske: He was indeed. And what's much more important from our point
of view--I speak now as a Berkeley person—he had much more
representation for UCLA and its point of view in the Board of
Regents than Berkeley had. We had very few sympathetic
regents. One of them lives in Princeton and is now a friend of
mine, William Roth.

We had but four regents who were really in our corner and
one who was occasionally sympathetic—but that was the end of
the story. I'm talking now about the senate positions in the
crisis .

The December 8 resolutions were our point of entry. First
we had the meeting with the Regents, and that was successful.
We got Clark Kerr to support us to put the December 8th
Resolutions over so far as they concerned free speech—what it
was all about in the beginning- -and some other things. It was
under that resolution that the Emergency Executive Committee
was also created. It was short-lived, but it came at an
important moment.

Then came other moments which involved us with the Regents,
though these were very rare. I don't think you want me to go
into all that, but I do want to say what the Byrne committee
looked like as established by the Regents. I've learned since
that Bill Roth had a lot to do with that, but whatever the
reasons, the committee was charged with rethinking the whole UC
structure. I thought, and many people here thought, we really
needed restructuring, of which decentralization would be the
key feature. For us, it would have had to preserve the two
principles: professionalism within, which meant absolute
freedom of thought, and civic responsibility without.

Its a tricky thing to consider structure and governance
when everybody's on fire, and the fellow on your right thinks
you're a Maoist, and the fellow on your left thinks you're a
fascist. I think I told you this before.

Press Treatment of FSM

Lage: You did. There was a lot of writing about Berkeley. I'm

thinking about Nathan Glazer's article in Commentary. Berkeley
was on the national scene. Do you recall any of that? Or did
people from the East that you had connection with take an avid
interest in what was going on out here?

Schorske: They had an interest. But they perceived little about it
except the disruption of order, demonstrations and police
action. I felt myself this was a media failure, and notably a
failure of the New York Times . The Times ' education reporter,
Fred Hechinger, was my idea of a really poor journalist. He
seemed to have only one source of information: the statewide
administration.

Lage: Ah. So he didn't give a good--

Schorske: He was simply giving Clark Kerr's line. I hate to keep talking
negatively about Clark Kerr, because he did terrific things for
this whole state, the university, and Berkeley too, for which
he was not credited enough, especially by the faculty. 1 just
wanted to introduce that one demurrer. But in the crisis he
had his own views of what was possible and necessary for him,
and they were not the same as many of us on this campus.
Indeed, his initial rigidity compounded the problems, poured
oil on the fire. There cannot be denial of that.

Lage: So you don't think the Times gave the faculty's--

Schorske: The New York Times gave the official view. In the Los Angeles
Times, by contrast, I learned what first-class crisis
journalism was all about. Did I mention this to you?

Lage: No. You mentioned that you wanted to talk some about the press
treatment of this, so this is a good time to do that.

Schorske: All right, this is a good time, because the Los Angeles Times

reporter on education was the opposite end of the line from the
New York Times. His name was William Trombley.

Lage: Yes, William Trombley. He covered education for a long time.2

*0ral history with William Trombley, conducted in 1994 by Dale
Treleven, UCLA Oral History Program, California State Archives State
Government Oral History Program.

Schorske : I believe he became the education editor. He came up to

Berkeley systematically. He became a good friend of mine, and
he also became close to people who did not see eye to eye with
me at all on the crisis, whether in the faculty,
administration, or the student body. Trombley earned
everybody's trust, because he canvassed widely and took
seriously everything that everybody said. He became a real
purveyor of the actual positions that people were occupying.
It's very hard to do reportage like this. It's hard for the
reporter, it's hard for the interviewees. But he had such a
balance in his mentality that he could in fact do that. And
boy, did I prize him for it. It became an example of what
really great journalism could be.

I have agitated for him to get a Pulitzer prize in his
time. His reporting on the Berkeley campus, if it had been
published in the New York Times, would have created nationally
a very different picture of our situation. I don't want to say
it would necessarily favor the segment of opinion I was
identified with, but the left's position and issues of
principles would not have been swamped by the issues of order
that occupied the right and much of the center.

The negative publicity was a matter of deep concern to the
faculty that espoused the free speech cause. In a crisis in
which freedom and order were both involved, those whose basic
concern was with order—which included strict adherence to
campus regulations—were always favored over those primarily
concerned with freedom. It was much like the civil rights
movement, where the protest marches were "illegal," but
fundamental to the realization of new freedoms.

I don't think that we have mentioned the faculty groups
that formed about this division. But we should briefly
identify them, because the left group, favoring the free speech
principles, tried to break through the law-and-order publicity
on its own on one occasion. That was the group I belonged to.

Our group started in the middle of the troubles. In a way
we had the initiative, because when the crisis was so big in
the fall [of 1964], the administration wasn't getting anywhere
with its attempts to curb. Then the faculty had to form around
something, and they formed around us, for we had the clarity of
principle and the will to activate the senate as an
institution. So if you look at the December 8th Resolution and
the pamphlets that went with it, you will see that we had an
advantage because we had thought the thing through and we knew
who we were.

Lage: The Committee of Two Hundred, do you remember that?
Schorske: I remember that.

Lage:
Schorske:

Lage:

Schorske :

This was active before December 8th, and more on the left side.

I remember it as a name, and I think it was on the left, and I
probably was a participant in that. But it didn't claim my
full-time allegiance, even though it may have spawned the small
committee caucus that came out of that.

You may have been the ones who wrote the December 8th
Resolutions. I think that's what I remember.

I'll bet you're right. I just forgot it.
case of the way memory plays me false.

See, this is another

Anyway, that faculty group certainly, we had a big bloc of
support in the faculty, although I'm sure that some of the
people who later formed or went with the more conservative
Faculty Forum attended meetings of the Committee of Two Hundred
in the beginning. That's probably the way it worked.
Certainly that's the way I remember it--like Martin Malia, we
were very close, he and I, in the beginning of the crisis,
talking all the time. Then gradually the sides divided. So it
went. He helped found the forum as a law-and-order group.
That's part of the process.

But about the publicity and the press: Henry Smith of our
caucus had a friend who was a member of the English department,
or perhaps the speech department, but also a Journalist close
to the Chronicle or something. I have forgotten his name. He
was a very fine young person. He arranged for us to actually
have a kind of a press conference, but private. He took the
view that, to have any real impact on the press, one must talk
to the owners, publishers, and editors, not to reporters.
Somehow, a group of them, including William Rnowland, the arch
enemy of free speech in the university, agreed to meet us. We
made no formal statement or anything like that. The aim was to
try to tell people who were in command of the press what we
thought really the issues were and how our thinking went, and
to meet their views directly.

So we met--I remember it quite vividly--in San Francisco at
Jack's, a now-defunct, wonderful old restaurant on Sacramento
Street. We met in a private room and had an afternoon or an
evening, or a lunch or something, of open, free discussion with
the press people, just trying to press through and get some
more attention paid to the point of view of some faculty

Lage:
Schorske ;

Lage:
Schorske :

Lage:
Schorske:

members who sympathized with the aims of FSM, and the reasons
behind them. We had some success with that.

And Rnowland participated, you say?

He did, he came to this. I'm pretty sure I remember right. I
can't guarantee it, but I think he did. There were probably
six or eight faculty members quite randomly chosen: Reggie
Zelnik or Ken Stampp might have been among them. You might ask
Ken if he was there. But Henry Smith picked the people and
arranged it all. That was just an attempt because we felt it
[press coverage] was so very bad. We were also more than eager
to go to alumni groups, to go to any place we were asked, and
try to get invitations to go to the local churches, to talk
wherever we could talk.

To sort of counteract the press?

Yes, yes. For the press focused essentially on the worst
student behavior, not the issues. I used in my talks an
example of what we thought the university should be, which was
something some members of the history department showed during
the big anti-communist campaign. Did I talk to you about that
last time?

About the forums?

The noon lecture series on communism,
activities.

Yes. [See Chapter II]

And the other ACLU-type

The communism noon lectures provided an example to me of the
way we ought to be behaving. We didn't have a common line; we
had different perspectives depending on where we came from and
what part of the world we were dealing with, but we were all
trying to test our own propositions and to confront the public
with a different view. That's the place where it had to be
recognized that we of the university had to reflect on the
tensions in the society and make our own scholarly Judgments on
them known.

That was the hard thing to get going and very difficult to
maintain when you were being put under stress. During the FSM
years, the recourse to force or pressure tactics buried or
distorted the issues. When the students would occupy a
building or something some people were ready to ignore the
issue of free speech and student rights to organize politically
and simply backed police action. They felt that was warranted

Lage:

because of the misbehavior. But when the police came, or when
Reagan sent his airplanes with gas to the campus, then the left
would feel justified in defending the student actions. In a
dialectic of protest and repression, the problem of order and
principle became conflated and confused.

In either case, yes.

A Memorable Meeting with FSM Leaders

Lage: You talked to the press, you talked to the Regents, you talked
to the alums. Did you yourself meet with the student leaders
of FSM?

Schorske: Yes, I met a number of times with them in different contexts.
I had some in my class, so I could talk to some of them.

Lage: How did that work? I know some people who dealt with students
became very frustrated with shifting positions.

Schorske: Sure. So did I. I had no permanent commitment to many

positions they were taking, partly because they were changing
all the time. Only where the key factors of academic freedom
and civil rights for university members came into play: that
was where my loyalty was and would remain.

I had one very unhappy experience when- -probably because I
was a member of the Emergency Executive Committee and
considered to be the lefty in that small group--! was invited
by the FSM to a big meeting of leaders and their loose in-group
of activists.

Lage: The Steering Committee, I think they called it.

Schorske: Yes, the Steering Committee, and who was on it, and how many of
the friends of those on it would be at a given meeting varied.
I was invited to a fairly large one. I had a very miserable
evening, because I soon realized that I was sitting not to
exchange views or to discuss, but as a scapegoat. I was put on
the hot seat and given the hot foot. It was something between
a revolutionary tribunal and a ritual slaying of an old bull, a
father slaying.

Lage: And you were the liberal member of the Emergency Executive
Committee.

Schorske: Yes, but that made no difference. For that evening, the most
radical students set the tone. I doubt that it was planned
that way. It emerged as the kind of group dynamic you often
get in mass movements. It wasn't necessarily deliberate
cruelty, but in situations like that, the worst guy, the
boldest brother, always has the voice.

Lage: So it was an attacking kind of thing?

Schorske: Attacking, and the strongest weapon is the weapon of laughttr.
If you can say something that makes the other person, the
"guest," that penetrates his armor with wit, then the laughter
breaks out, and the laughter consolidates the mob, the mass, in
its own righteousness and its sense of otherness from its
scapegoat. So I experienced that; that was unpleasant.

In Europe too, in 1968, it was common for radical students
to reject the professors who espoused their cause. Marcuse at
Frankfurt, the theologian Helmut Gollwitzer in Berlin were
pilloried even worse in this way. Many European professors
were scarred for life by this treatment. My hosts that night
let me feel their distance, even their cruelty—often through
derisive laughter--but for me it was a sign that others on the
faculty, such as Reggie Zelnik, would have to hold the lines of
communication open to the leaders of FSM. My usefulness in
this role, never great, was clearly at an end.

Teaching and the Intellectual Atmosphere during FSM

Schorske :

Lage:

In contrast to this unusual experience with the student
activists, I have to cite marvelous experiences as a teacher in
the sixties. Reading Ray Colvig's account,3 I want to tell you
that his stress on the faculty ratings — and other evidences
about the university that show it still a very vigorous
intellectual center—certainly conforms to my experience. I
don't know exactly what class you were in, Ann.

I was here during that time. I was class of
was in graduate school during the FSM.

'63, and then I

Schorske: Were you in my course during that time or before?

'Chronology of events of the 1960s, prepared by Ray Colvig, campus
public information officer. A copy of this chronology is in the UC
Archives, The Bancroft Library. A summary of the chronology was sent to
Professor Schorske before this interview session.

Lage:

Schorske :

Lage:
Schorske:

Lage:
Schorske ;

Lage:
Schorske :
Lage:

Schorske :

I think it was before.

Doesn't make any difference. I can tell you that the work that
was done in class, the atmosphere in class, to me were
extremely stimulating.

Even during the midst of it?

Oh, sure. When I went off campus to teach, the engaged
atmosphere in class never dropped. Not all people attended,
but the people who followed me off campus were as involved with
the work as ever. There were people who felt it was wrong for
me--

When you held your class off campus?

Right. When 1 held it up in the Newman Club on College Avenue,
or the Westminster House.

So some people thought you shouldn't hold your class at all?
Sure, naturally.

Did anybody say you should hold your class on campus?
there any students who objected to--

Were

Yes, I had a few letters like that. It was not a problem for
me, because I was giving my classes. The students were often
asked to travel shorter distances to get to the classes that I
was giving off campus than they would have if they had to go
from some other part of the campus to get to where I was
scheduled to give the class. So that was an easy thing to
answer: "I am available, 1 insist on being available. I will
cooperate with the strike against the policy of the university,
but I will not stop my teaching function come hell or high
water, because that's not what I'm here for."

Those classes also were very good. They may have been
tense, and the students may often have colored their findings
with the results of the intensity of the experience they were
going through, but they were intellectually alive. So who the
hell cares? As a teaching situation it was fine, it was just
fine. And to get that across to the press--??

I shall give you one opposite piece of testimony, the worst
personal moment I ever had in Berkeley. I used to give my grad
seminar at home. I lived out on El Camino Real, the other side
of the Claremont Hotel beyond Ashby Avenue.

Lage:
Schorske :

Lage:
Schorske:

Lage:
Schorske :

Near Tunnel Road.

That's right. Anyway, I always had my seminar there. I
continued that during the time the students were on strike.
But my seminar was "off campus" as always in my home. It was
nothing new. But one night, three members of my seminar came
to the door, not to come in, but to tell me that they were no
longer willing to have the seminar at home. I don't know
whether that was during the strike or not; I'm not sure. But
it was in a moment of high hostility.

The man who led this little group, I remember him very
well. He was a professed Maoist. There were very few students
who made it a creed. He wore heavy boots; he had the militant
costumery to go with the position—another great rarity among
the student activists. He gave me to understand that he and
the two students (who were actually my lecture course
assistants) would no longer attend my seminar.

At all? Or they didn't like it at home?
you and your activities?

Or did they object to

At all. No, they did not want, in this situation, to attend my
seminar. Whether it was because I should have been totally on
strike, I really can't remember. I remember only the tone, the
peremptory tone, in which this was delivered. To hold one's
seminars at home wasn't so very normal at any time, though
other faculty members certainly did it in my department. But I
didn't think I deserved this kind of treatment. I had a
record, and they knew what the record was. Also I felt that
for them to cut their academic activity as graduate students
meant something different from students interfering with a
class--! had only one episode where anybody tried to stop a
lecture, and that was quickly dispelled. The episode at home
was uniquely painful, for I was its target as a professional,
not as an institutional representative as I had been at the FSM
scapegoating meeting.

Can you remember if we're talking about the FSM time or later?

I'm pretty sure this is still FSM. All my major experiences
with students, as with the senate, were pretty much FSM in the
mid-sixties. You have to realize how much I was gone.

In the later sixties.

In the later sixties. It began almost right away. I had
already had a leave promised to go to the Behavioral Studies

Center for a half year, which I believe was in the spring of
"66. So I was only in—

Lage: Then you were at Princeton "67 to '68.

Schorske: Yes. Beginning in the fall of '67.

Lage: You were assistant to Chancellor Heyns.

Schorske: Very briefly. I was there for a year.

Lage: Did you teach during that year, or were you occupied with—

Schorske: Certainly. I taught. I don't think I taught a full load, but
I certainly taught. When I came back, in the fall of '68, the
situation on campus was much worse than when I left in many
ways. At one level, people were inured to the really sick side
of things, Telegraph Avenue and so on. But it was a shock to
return to see how far cultural deterioration had proceeded.
Now we're talking about really sick people, Berkeley
counterculture—students and others—of wasted lives.

Lage: Yes. I think we should hold off on that. We've spent our time
today. I think we're going to wear you out if I keep prodding
away. Just to wind up with the FSM period, do you have any
comments about Henry May's leadership [as department chair]
during FSM?

Schorske: It's odd. I don't remember it as striking one way or another.
I remember that he chaired a large meeting of the department
shortly after the crisis broke—you refreshed my memory and
then 1 recalled it— where the department discussed what
position to take, if any. He certainly chaired it pretty well.
Henry May certainly didn't share my position; he didn't from
the beginning. He's very nervous about radicals anyway,
especially radical action. This goes way back, at least to our
graduate days at Harvard. It doesn't mean that he's a right-
winger at all; he's a true liberal. But he also is very
nervous about anything that isn't within rather conventional
channels. That manifested itself quickly and made him join
with Delmer Brown and Martin Malia and others who shared his
position, in the so-called Faculty Forum.

I don't remember that his leadership of the department
betrayed any political position. He didn't make politics from
his administrative position, and he didn't prevent it. He was
a true chairman, what the chairman of our department was
supposed to be. I can only say that if I remember nothing
striking, the more the credit to him for that.

100

V EDUCATIONAL REFORM AND CULTURAL CHANGE IN THE WAKE OF FREE
SPEECH MOVEMENT

[Interview 3: May 6, 1997] it

Charles Muscatine and the Commission on Educational Reform

[Carroll Brentano is present during the interview, which was
conducted at the Brentano home.)

Lage: Yesterday I thought we really did finish up on FSM. I don't want
to dwell on it, so if something comes to mind as we're talking,
fine, but let's move on.

Schorske: What are we moving onto?

Lage: Well, your one year with Roger Heyns as assistant to the chancellor
for educational development, but beyond that, your comments on and
relationship with this move towards educational reform during that
time. The Muscatine Report1 came out, and the Tussman College
program began, and I wondered if you had a role with either of
those?

Schorske: No, not really. Muscatine was one of the faculty group that was

organized to support the aim of free speech. Muscatine came out of
that. But, as you are probably aware, he was earlier a refugee
from the oath controversy of the fifties, and he came to Wesleyan
where I was teaching. Have I told you this?

Lage: Yes, you knew him at Wesleyan.

Schorske: He was a member of the smaller group that in the end made the
December 8th Resolution or that moved toward that. What you
identified as the Committee of Two Hundred—and I had forgotten
that name—but anyway, we were the little caucus that was sort of
self-appointed .

Lage: And was interested in civil liberties?

'Education at Berkeley: Report of the Select Committee on Education. UC
Berkeley Academic Senate, March 1966.

101

Schorske:

Lage:

Schorske:

Lage:
Schorske:

Yes, but as individuals. Only after the troubles began did we
come together as a larger group. If you don't have the identity
of those people, you probably should. They were — it was a little
bit floating. The historians were Kenneth Stampp, [Charles]
Sellers, Reginald Zelnik, and myself. 1 think that's all. There
was Howard Schachman from molecular biology. There were three
sociologists who came and went, but they were in and out all the
time. They were Philip Selznick, [William] Kornhauser, and Leo
Lowenthal. Lowenthal was the most continuous member of this
group; it lasted several years. But the others were very
important and active, Selznick in particular. Then the political
science person was Sheldon Wolin, who played a big role in
reconstitution after I left Berkeley. He was also very important
in the so-called Foote-Mayer report.2 They were already working on
the constitution of the Berkeley campus. Muscatine and Henry Nash
Smith were the people in our group from the English department.

This group lasted relatively intact until the end of 1964/65.
I mention this because nobody had any idea of all the activities
that were going to develop, but as it happened, various members of
the group became engaged in the spin-off activities that followed
from the initial FSM impulse. Muscatine was the main one who took
up educational reform.

How do you see these related to the push from the students?
was it a faculty initiative?

It was certainly not a faculty initiative. Educational
improvement was something about which members of the faculty--
there were aspects of this that always bothered members of the
faculty. One of the people who was most concerned and most active
about it is the much-maligned Ray Sontag, who was very concerned
about how to keep personal connection with students in the mass
educational system. He didn't have any nostrums for this, but in
his own teaching reached out to vast numbers of students through
interviews, things that people didn't do. When you taught classes
of a hundred or more--

You mean class office-hour types of things?

Yes. He had office hours, and he kept a file box of the students
to kind of refresh his mind about their personal characters and
problems. This was often seen as something—and it may have been
that --that enabled him to play favorites, or that he had a taste
for that. But the other side of it was the depth of his
educational concern, and that was very real. He had that

2Caleb Foote, Henry Mayer, et al. The Culture of the University:
Governance and Education (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, Inc., 1968).

102

reputation at Princeton before he came here. When he came to a
mass university, he refused to give it up. He didn't Just become
a lecturer; he was a teacher. I'm talking about undergraduate
education; that was his particular thing to get worried about.

What triggered the push for educational reform? I really feel
it was a student thing, but it was something which 1 think Mario
Savio, in an inspired moment, launched as an attack in some speech
that had nothing to do with the free speech issue, but had to do
with flouting authority on educational grounds. In that famous
phrase: "We're just a card. Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate."

Lage: That really took hold in the imagination of the students.

Schorske: Not just with the students; it precipitated an issue, that the way
the registrar's office worked, the way the whole machinery for
enrolling in courses worked, whether you were in a large course or
a small course, all these things. Nobody had systematically
thought that through. That triggered the educational reform
thing.

Then in the wake of the actual FSM business, when it began to
get resolved—that is, in December—because the faculty took hold
of the question, the senate, then the other issues began to
surface. For good or for ill, they surfaced. One of them was
educational practice and how it would work, could something be
done to personalize a mass institution in education?

That led to the establishment of the Muscatine committee, the
Committee on Educational Reform. Muscatine certainly was
interested in this. His interests ranged beyond just the forms of
education or even the question of intimacy between students and
teachers. He got into questions of language, the relation between
high and vernacular literature. He became related, in a very
interesting way—I don't know how much he knew him personally, he
knew him somewhat— to Father Ong. Is this a name to you?

Lage: No.

Schorske: He's a great scholar. He was from St. Louis University. I'm not
sure what order it was; it doesn't make any difference. He was a
scholar of the great Portuguese intellectual of the fifteenth or
sixteenth century, very famous— Ramon Lul. He's a Portuguese
humanistic scholar. That was his specialty, but he got on to all
kinds of extra questions.

Lage: This Father Ong?

Schorske: Yes. They had to do with uses of language and how our literary

language is not necessarily exhaustive of culture, that it was the

103

beginning of a critique of "pure" language from the academy,
begins to ramify. I could go on on this-- [laughs]

This

Cultural Side Issues to the Free Speech "Revolution"

Lage: How does this relate to the educational reform?

Schorske: Because it suggests one side of educational reform that was begun
but not then carried very far. More was done at Stanford in
specific classes than here to take in vernacular literature as
part of literary substance, and to indicate how it was related to
the literary potential, if you like, of purely low-culture
language. Central to this discussion then came people like
[William] Burroughs, the Naked Lunch. [Robert Pirzig's] [Zen and
the Art of] Motorcycle Maintenance. So it was not yet into the
question of using black English or things like that, but it was
moving that way.

Now, Muscatine had a feel for this. He didn't carry it very
far himself, but this latched onto things that are very deep in
the Catholic tradition of Father Ong. Sensitivity to local
language is developed when you engage in missionary work. One set
of missionaries wants to Europeanize "the native," and the other
set wants to say, "Culture is culture, Christianity is
Christianity. They should be brought together, but don't confuse
the one with the other." Respect all human language and cultures.
1 would say this point of view began to have some resonance in a
post-Christian, multicultural world context.

Lage: And it does seem right that it grew out of this movement in the
sixties.

Schorske: Yes, out of the cultural quests of minorities for separate
identities, and it did grow out of the ethnic movements in
universities, but it was something which in the end education
needed to take account of. Now we get into the problems of '69 to
'71. I was not fully in all this, but these are things that began
to issue from that, and where academics began to get interested in
it.

Lage: That almost sounds like new subjects rather than new forms of
class instruction.

Schorske: Yes, but it also fits with what do you think your education is
doing? How far are you converting people into a homogeneous
elite? How far are you making a universal culture? And how far
are you making a pluralized culture? It took almost two decades

104

for these issues to surface enough so that they acquired address
by academic people.

Lage: But you see roots of them in this time.

Schorske: Yes. The frames began to be set. We're always talking about

overlapping revolutions. As I told you before, the simple civil
liberties thing was the beginning and the heart of the first push,
but then it became an empowerment question for students. When the
empowerment question came for students, that happened to coincide
with empowerment questions that some of the students and faculty
had already been involved in with the civil rights movement. Some
of the professors had been involved in this, Kenneth Stampp very
vigorously among them in the civil rights movement. Even though
it would probably not have occurred to Kenneth Stampp to press the
claims of black vernacular culture against American high culture,
that is what some scholars in the department—Larry Levins and
Leon Litwack--did. The minority rights movements fueled the
ethnic studies movements.

The dissolution of conventional authority that took place
around the liberation in a very traditional way of a rights
revolution for free speech, when it became a rights revolution for
civil rights, that was already a step toward radicalization. If
in another step you then throw the body in, and you begin to
develop the sexual aspect of liberation, the feminist aspect of
this, there's a radiating set--

Lage: Very far-reaching.

Schorske: Indeed. So the political revolution, as so often happens, begins
to develop cultural ramifications and begins to erode structures
of authority that have been operating with a social consensus
unquestioned by anybody for years and years. The modes of
deference suddenly change. What kind of clothes do you wear when
you speak to the chancellor?

I remember when I was working with Heyns, one evening he
invited the FSM committee to the house to dinner. He had moved
himself back to the campus; Chancellor Strong lived away from the
campus. He took over the old president's house and wanted to
reactivate it, to be a visible presence on campus. He invited
Bettina [Aptheker] , et cetera, to meet him. He hadn't met them.
I was asked to introduce the people. So we met, and to my
surprise, they were all dressed up in a conventional way. I say
to my surprise, because that was not the way they had lately
disported themselves on the campus. Getting your tie off was the
first step; throwing your jacket away was the second.

Lage: For the women, the dresses went.

105

Schorske:

Lage:

Schorske :

Men and women, right. They began to dress alike, with jeans;
unisex came. These things happened, and then became quickly
generalized in the culture so that even people who were not
involved in the movement adopted the new loose style. It wasn't
possible for me any longer to do what I mentioned to you
yesterday, to tell who was a child of a farmer in the Valley from
who was a child of the San Francisco elite or who was from a
Jewish high school in Los Angeles. You couldn't tell it by the
clothing any more because everybody began to dress alike.

Do you remember any more about that dinner?
between the generations went?

How the feelings

1 don't remember a thing. [laughter] Yes, 1 have one picture.
It was my meeting with these students. We had agreed to meet in
front of the steps that led up to the house. We did, and I
remember my surprise at their dress. 1 don't think I remarked on
it. I brought them in and introduced them. It was a perfectly
agreeable and civilized evening. Everybody was on their good
behavior—which didn't mean that twenty-four hours later that they
wouldn't be on bad, i.e., defiant, behavior again. [laughter]

I remember it as a truce, but I don't remember anything about
the substance. It was a way of their saying, "We're ready to work
with a new guy." But how far that went, and what were their
internal discussions about, I know nothing.

You must understand I was never really personally close to any
of the Steering Committee except one: Martin Roysher. He was in
my class and you might have even known him. He became very turned
on when I worked in my course on William Morris, the English Pre-
Raphaelites, and the Arts and Crafts Movement, with their relation
to socialism.

Roysher, unlike many of the student leaders, was very inclined
to socialism. He was also the son of a professor of silver
craftsmanship in an important school in Los Angeles for practical
training in the crafts. So Roysher had a very high respect for
arts and crafts, and he never knew that that had any connection
with socialism or things like that.

You will remember that another cultural manifestation of the
sixties movement was a mania for arts and crafts. People got
turned on by it; this was an alternative way of making a living
without entering the system. This is how hippies thought they
would set themselves up independent of the society, often on
communes on the land, and so on. With Roysher, that crafts thing
resonated before it became widespread. I told you yesterday how
electric I found much of the atmosphere to be in my classes, in my
teaching. The relation I had with Roysher and other students who,

106

whatever their politics, were searching history for clues to their
present situation, was interesting, if rarely close.

Lage: Did you know Michael Rossman?

Schorske: I knew Michael Rossman, though not well. He was intellectually
quite forceful, but unlike Roysher, he had not sublimative
capacity. The FSM was a desublimating movement on the whole.

Lage: Now, tell me what you mean by that.

Schorske: What I mean is that when you let aggressive instinct loose, as
revolutionary or counter-revolutionary movements do, there is a
way of letting it go raw so that you can shred the opponent. The
relation between love and rape; let's put these at two poles.
Both are based on sexual instinct, but love can be spiritualized.
Art carries the same process further, make virtual experience out
of instinctual impulse, and this inhibits it. Our instincts are
most related to our animal character psychologically, and we are
animals. But then if you begin to refine them, give them mental
form, that's sublimation. You then have indirect feeling where
direct impulse was the rule before.

Lage: And this FSM group had difficulty with sublimation?

Schorske: They were not strong sublimators, at least in their collective
action. And the problem is--

Lage: [laughs] Others might describe it differently.

Schorske: And then you have people on the faculty. In Freudian terms, they
have strong egos and superegos, repressing the id. Many of them
have great trouble sublimating. They may do so in the little
corners of their lives. But mostly faculty people, they are
rational, active in the constructive power of the intellect,
logic, et cetera, and they are also ethical. At least it's part
of our academic code, our convention, that we should be ethical
people, to repress instinct. Nobody tells us to be artistic
people, sublimators. And if you look at the history of the
universities, it's always been a problem to get aesthetics, man's
sublimative aspect, taken seriously at a university.

Personal Response to Cultural Changes of the Sixties

Lage: Let me ask you: during the sixties, do you think your ability to
kind of stand back and apply a cultural analysis helped you deal
with the change better? Some faculty fell by the wayside in terms
of support for the students.

107

Schorske: I did too in some ways, but I can only say I don't think that my
capacity for aesthetic sublimation, which is high, was much of an
obstacle to my relating to the students even though they were
desublimating and letting their instincts speak. Other people
were outraged by student behavior because they confused
conventions of order with the principles of law.

Lage: Or lack of deference to authority seemed to—

Schorske: Upset them? That's the worst side of it. The best side of the

legal outlook is that there is regularity in civil relations, and
that law expresses it, and so on. I was not outraged by the
defiance of legal authority, because authority was violating
rights. I didn't favor disorderly behavior, .but it didn't bother
me so deeply, any more than it did in the civil rights movement or
the anti-Vietnam War movement.

Lage: You mentioned coming back from your leave in Princeton—now we're
jumping way ahead—and being kind of shocked by changes that
occurred the year that you were gone. Was there a point when you
kind of lost faith in where this revolution was going?

Schorske: No, that concern began earlier. The rawness had always bothered
me, as had the rigidity of the administration; I can't deny that.
Revolution and counter revolution are a deadly team. What
bothered me when I returned was that the visible signs of— I would
almost call it a cultural sickness— had begun to manifest
themselves. I mean the street and drug culture, the onset of
which many of us hardly noticed. The presence then of people from
all over the country for whom Berkeley became a mecca who had
nothing to do here, who were idle and who engaged themselves on
and off in the protest movement, but who began to saturate the
whole surround of the university with a presence of decaying life
--it was no longer informed engagement or anything like that (I
shudder to use a word as formalistic as that), but rather they
were just a presence looking for a peculiar kind of release from
the normal constraints that a culture imposes.

Lage: When did you notice that aspect taking over? Not during FSM?

Schorske: I don't know. I told you in the interview last November, or

whenever we were together, that the first awareness of this that
caught to my full attention was that little guy carrying the sign
saying "Fuck." The "filthy speech movement."

Lage: Which occurred right on the heels of FSM. [March 3, 1965]

Schorske: So that was very early. That was the beginning. That was only

the beginning of a sort of revolution of the body, a return of the
repressed. It brought a drastic shift from what had been rights
in the area of politics and justice to new freedoms in the area of

108

libidinal and instinctual life. That had its cultural
ramifications, and some of them were very good; thus there was an
intellectual and aesthetic side that was remarkable. I was
interested in [Gustav] Mahler, and I'll never forget how, quite
suddenly, Mahler became the composer for the musically sensitive
part of the new student culture.

Now that's a small corner, but Mahler, with his fragmented
style, with the power of his emotions, with the whipsaw and
whiplash kind of musical compositional technique, Mahler was a
composer who fit a new psychological culture of feeling.
Beethoven, who's always returning you back to terra finna and
hammering in the diatonic system again, after his Promethean
excursions into the unknown, isn't with it in the sense of the
endless kaleidoscopic exfoliation of Mahler. When you had people
wearing buttons—one of the first signs of the new freedom on
campus were tables selling buttons on Sproul Plaza, you could get
a button saying "Mahler Grooves." Well, this is, was sublimation
--the cultural side of the student revolt.

Lage: These are things that are forgotten, I think.

Schorske: Of course they are, and these are things that weren't noticed at
the time either. But these are all in the realm of aesthetics.
They're not in the realm of justice, law.

Lage: So we have that shift, and then we have the Third World issue
coming in.

Schorske: The Third World issue comes in, and that was another phase of the
multi-dimensional political/cultural revolution of the sixties.
And of course, that was a huge shift that happened in the year of
my absence, to the best of my knowledge. I never really got
involved with that except, when I came back, it was a presence,
and faculty had virtually no contact with the people who were
pressing this. There were interested faculty who wanted the cause
pursued, but there was practically nobody--the German professor,
Fritz Tubach was an exception- -who had contact with the people who
led it, a new group with ties to the black radical movements
outside the university.

Lage: Community people?

Schorske: Community people. Don't ask me about that; I'm too ignorant.

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A Range of Responses to a Revolutionary Situation: Heyns .
Meyerson, Searle, and the "Yellow Submarine"

Lage: Okay. [laughs] Now, we started off talking about educational
reform and we got way off, so let's go back.

Schorske: I want to go back to education. I can't deal with the making of

the Muscatine Report, for I can't remember it well, except that it
recommended much greater flexibility in programming and the
establishment of separate small college units within the
university. The Strawberry Canyon College experiment issued from
it. It had some similarity to the Tussman Experimental College
Program which was activated before the report, I think. But it
didn't have the rather stiff, formalistic quality that Tussman
drew from his great mentor, Alexander Meiklejohn. Others can tell
you about the Tussman experiment and its meaning.

I myself favored pluralism for the solution of the mass
university's educational problem. What I came to realize was that
in practice, if you wanted to change the education, you would have
to do it by resigning yourself to the introduction of a great many
transient programs, some of which might take, some of which might
rub off and not take but leave a legacy of some sort, while much
of it would not last. I still believe that. In all forms of
teaching, you cannot institutionalize it and make it permanent.
The problem is to find a flexible relationship between slowly
evolving disciplines and the more quickly changing student culture
and its intellectual interests and values.

What we had is a special problem that was a concern of mine
when I was involved with Heyns: how to meet deep need for new
forms of education without succumbing to ideological fashion or,
on the faculty side, traditionalist conceptions. My wife was in a
way more involved than I with educational innovation, because she
was a researcher for Neil Smelser, whose name has not come up much
here. I hope you're going to do an interview with Neil Smelser.

Lage: I hope to.

Schorske: He was not in my political camp, but he was a person I deeply
respected as an intellectual educator.

Lage: He was more moderate?

Schorske: Yes. He didn't seem to be a political man at all as far as

student rights were concerned. He was not concerned with the
university's shape and structure either. He was an interesting
sociologist, very theoretically inclined, but he didn't mix it up
with radical, conservative—these categories meant little to him,
as far as I could see. He was interested in the substance of

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educational improvement. And his first thing, and that was under
Heyns--

Lage: He succeeded you in the post as vice chancellor for educational

reform.

Schorske: I think so in substance, yes--but I was never a vice chancellor.
Well, he did a lot more with it. I have to step back one second
to say that when I was with Heyns in his first six months, you
must understand what the degree of the problem was on the campus
when all the new movements were bursting out all over. Reform
efforts were in the hands of the faculty committees, or being
agitated for by the students. Actually, three of us—you may get
different testimony from Cheit or Searle--but I always thought the
three of us were sort of the inner advisors to Heyns --working as a
group to meet constantly shifting pressures.

Lage: Heyns was new on the campus.

Schorske: He was new on the campus. He was very good about taking advice,
but also a very strongly defined person, much more strongly self-
defining than Meyerson, who took advice more readily and had a
much wider span of vision for alternatives than Heyns.

Schorske: Heyns had a sense of justice, and strong ethical convictions.
This man was completely on the side of righteousness, he was a
law-type man. Meyerson was less so. Meyerson was a very
aesthetic and cosmopolitan person, and Heyns was a very, I would
almost say provincial, Michigander, Oak Grove Dutch. That's where
he came from. And a philosopher-psychologist of a very scientific
kind. He's truly Dutch Reformed: ethical but somewhat rigid.

Lage: Was he the right man for that time, or do you think somebody more
like Meyerson could have done more?

Schorske: Meyerson would have been better, I think, but never mind.

Meyerson failed later in other institutions. Who would succeed in
that turbulent situation, God alone knows. I feel Heyns did a
very fine job according to his lights, though I became more and
more distant from his rigid policies. It was a good thing I left
on sabbatical, because I would have had to leave his team for
policy reasons. I could not go the police route.

Lage: Do you mean bringing in the police?

Schorske: Yes. And I could not go with the basic attitude that Heyns, Cheit
and Searle had, that to do things strictly by the rules, you solve
problems with rules. It's not my temperament.

Ill

Lage : Is it John Searle's temperament?
Schorske: Emphatically.

Lage: He'd been so much a student supporter, or at least that was the
impression 1 had.

Schorske: John Searle was a real student supporter in the beginning. He was
an English angry young man. He was no nonsense. He and Tom
Nagel, another able philosopher who went lo NYU, were the two
angry young men of the philosophy department. There were two in
math who were really wild men: [Stephen] Smale and somebody else.
All of these people were extremely capable in their academic
disciplines, let me make it very clear, but in their relations
with the students they were, for my money, too uncritical at one
end, and, in the case of Searle, much too repressive at the later
end of the development.

Lage: Did you see Searle make a switch during this period?

Schorske: Oh, sure. It was a visible switch, from a radical stress on
political rights to a radical stress on academic order.

Lage: What prompted it?

Schorske: I cannot enter that psychology. I do not know what prompted it.
There is no man who didn't have a threshold of tolerance: "How
much shall we live in the disorder in patience and wait it out?"
Ken Stampp: unintelligible switch from one position to another
with respect to student defiance of academic authority. Perhaps
he could tolerate breaches of civility when political freedom was
at stake, but not for cultural freedom or student power. You may
get the reason for it, he may give it to you in his testimony.
But to me it was unintelligible He not only switched, but he
became a very angry man, not that he ever became a reactionary.

Lage: I think he perceives that he stayed the same and the ground
beneath him switched.

Schorske: I think he could be absolutely right about that. That's what I

mean by patience, in the face of the wider process unfolding that
transcended the issue of free speech. Berkeley's was, in form
though not in scale, truly a revolutionary situation—and that was
for me as an historian its great lesson. I learned more from the
university upheaval than from all the history books I had read
about what the dynamic of revolution is: I learned that it is a
dynamic of dissolution and halting re-integration; and that no
person can know from its initial form how far it will go or in
what channels it will flow. The dissolution will go on, and on,
and on, until slowly islands of recongelation, of some kind of
order, will begin to emerge in a place that is not necessarily

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expected. It's not the same as a victory of repression. The
repressive thing will gather around possibilities for order that
emerge from the open situation. Whether they be reactionary or
progressive, one often doesn't know. But the dissolution process
is one that tries the soul.

Lage : Did you discuss it with Searle?

Schorske: With Searle, no. I happened to be away when the intervention was
made- -the "bust" in the student union—that led to the "Yellow
Submarine." That was the key moment. The "Yellow Submarine" was
the sign of a great change in direction of the student movement.
That particular Beatles song was connected with the drug culture:
it was connected also with a certain utopianism. The embattled
students in the union thought of it as a moment of solidarity,
expressing the will to resist the overwhelming force of the power
that was brought against them. But the "Yellow Submarine" was
also a testimony of defeat.

Lage: And withdrawal.

Schorske: Yes. Retreat into the psyche. It was the place where the cult of
the body and the drug and the new culture began to really erode
the political will. That was a testimony of defeat. 1 didn't
read it that way at the time, but 1 see it that way now. The
Searle /Cheit police intervention, they undertook with great
conviction, and Heyns went along. How much was he involved? I
was not in on the decision, so I don't know. But certainly it
meant a lot to me in a negative way that our administration had
now taken police action when in that situation it really was
unnecessary, in my opinion. I wasn't here. It didn't look that
way to me. But I knew that the fat was in the fire again.
Berkeley went the way of confrontational force later taken by
Harvard and Columbia; not the wise, evasive, patient road of
Chicago, Yale, Wesleyan, and Princeton, which spared those
institutions from so much bitterness and grief.

Efforts to Improve Faculty-Student Dialogue

Lage: We left Neil Smelser because these other things came up, and I

think we have to pursue them when they do come up, but let's not
forget him.

Schorske: No, and you're probably going to have to reorder some of these
remarks. They can't just be put in this wild sequence that I'm
rolling along on.

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Lage: We'll see. There is a certain order to them, and, after all, the
events rolled along wildly as well.

Schorske: Yes, Neil Smelser. Neil had a very good idea- -or maybe it was

Roger Heyns--who was educationally open and fertile, by the way.
He was a good educator. I wish he had been made president of
Michigan, and so did a lot of people there, because he knew the
ground well and was a pioneer in educational innovation there,
instead of being dumped into this impossible governance situation
at Cal. The Smelser idea was that you go around the faculty and
you ask them what they would like for educational innovation,
department by department. Very institutional, very legalistic,
very formal. Not to my taste, because department-centered. It's
all right as a starter.

It was something, however, to encourage the departments to
improve the relationship between faculty and students. What do
you feel you'd like to have? One percent of the budget was to be
devoted to innovative courses, I believe. Liz, my wife, was
Smelser 's interviewer. So she went to the departments and asked
these questions and learned about departmental difficulties in
Berkeley.

Lage: It'd be nice if all of that was kept. Do you think it is? Do you
think there's a record of it?

Schorske: I'll bet it is. She wrote it all up, department by department.

The amazing thing was that some departments already had marvelous
social devices, and they were usually for student /faculty contact.
It's one of the things the biologists were very good at, at least
some of the biologists. There were different biological
subgroups, but we had a marvelous life sciences group in the
campus generally. Some had ongoing weekly seminars. Whether it
was an outsider or a grad student or a professor, somebody every
week read a paper. Whether it was bag lunch or something like
that. This was the way to make a student a mature participant in
the scholarly community, to socialize him or her where it counted
most.

Lage: Was this something instituted in response to the sixties'
pressures from students--or was this a tradition in the
department?

Schorske: No, I'm sure that these biologists—because scientists are much

better in apprenticeship than we, especially with grad students--
they're not so hot on the undergraduates—but with the grad
students they can be very good. I think some of them already had
these things going. But Liz said the bottom line was everybody
wanted a place to have coffee, a social space; which, of course,
from where I sat was sheer nonsense. I believe in housing, and I
believe in places for social intercourse, but unless it has an

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intellectual function at its center, it achieves little. The idea
of sitting down and having coffee with a student in a department
lounge adds nothing--! 'd rather be on Sproul Plaza or the what-do-
you-call-it, the Golden Bear, cafeteria.

Lage: The dining center.

Schorske: Right. Or out on the street, on Telegraph in a coffee house. If
you want a coffee, you don't need--

Lage: So people wanted their little spots within each department.

Schorske: Right. That was one way to address the question. There were

certainly other suggestions but I do not know them. But the idea
of trying to say to the department, "What do you want?" must have
given Smelser information about how the departments were
responding officially to what would bring students and faculty
together.

Well, let me go to my own educational side. 1 really wrestled
with this bone myself because 1 had a large class.

Lage: You mentioned in an article you've written, which I have here

somewhere, an experience you had here and a student's comment. Do
you want to tell about that?

Schorske: You'd like it for this record?

Lage: Yes, if it was an important experience.

Schorske: It was important for me in trying to address the generation gap in
teaching intellectual history. It was the end of, I think it was
actually the second term of the year 1964-65. We were still then
on the semester system, I believe. But whatever it was, I always
taught through the year when I was on deck, so I can't fix the
term. Anyhow, the end of the term came, and I got the usual
applause that students give you. I walked out of the class with a
lot of students still around, and behind me this girl said--and I
remember a girl; I don't remember her name, but she was an
interesting woman, one of my Los Angeles high school types — saying
[scornfully]: "And they call that a dialogue."

That was the line she used to express her contempt of the
system of lecturing, and of my lecturing—that this was not
dialogue. There was no exchange between students and faculty. Of
course, my experience of that course in particular, and this is
always my number-one happy memory of my Berkeley teaching
experience, was that people did intervene in a large lecture
class. Even if they didn't intervene often, they brought me
after-class contributions to my own knowledge that were enormous.
That could come from any quarter.

115

Lage: You mean you found that students did respond to lectures?

Schorske: They did. They responded not only to lectures, but in them. I
believe in lecturing. I believe it is not only an efficient way
of teaching large numbers, but also brings out a certain aspect of
some instructors' flair for the oral form, who are ham actors in
some way. The less "ham" the better. But certainly the lecture
is a style of instruction that can be very persuasive.

Lage: And stimulating.

Schorske: Stimulating. So, good. I'm in favor of lecturing, but not
exclusively, or at the expense of the personal intellectual
exchange. When my student said these things about the dialogue, I
felt a deep-cutting truth. She was probably one who didn't like
lectures. Or she might have been turned on to say so by the going
FSM critique that this was a factory; that was a common indictment
of Berkeley.

Then the question was, how do you get a dialogue? That was
what interested me most in the sociological situation where the
culture of the students was drifting away from accepting, as a
valid experience, the very culture of their elders, of the
teachers. So how do you bridge? They have new questions.
They're not my questions, they're their questions. How do you in
that situation create a dialogue—not just between teacher and
student, but between generations who are ceasing to communicate
with each other? Whatever his/her personal respect or affinity
for the faculty member- -the student didn't have to be a member of
FSM or anything else to experience the generation gap. It's an
eternal problem, but in the crisis it grew wider and made the need
for more personal instruction more acute.

So my effort then was to devise a form of more personal
intellectual engagement within the frame of the larger lecture
system to address that. I was not alone; other faculty members
were doing it in their own ways. The method that I found—do you
want this?

Lage: Yes, I do. This is the kind of thing that's interesting, what
developed educationally from this era.

Schorske: My plan centered on teaching assistants who would run sections
with far more independence from the professor's lectures and
reading than was traditionally allowed. For that I needed support
from the administration.

Lage:

You hadn't had that before?

116

Schorske: I didn't have a section system. Like other lectures in history's
upper-division courses, I just had readers. I think that some
readers held some kind of informal discussion group, I'm not sure.
But now I had a system where the graduate student TAs [teaching
assistants] would devise their own subjects for consideration by
the students that were related to the structure of my course, but
were not locked in to my lectures and readings necessarily. I
called them satellite seminars.

The graduate students had to be much more numerous than the
readers because they had to teach sections, so they had to get
paid—that's where support came in. They would write a little
catalogue notice of about fifty to seventy-five words of what
their topic would be. I gave this course with different figures
considered, different intellectuals in philosophy or whatever, the
arts. The TAs could make up any theme they wished to trace
through those thinkers.

One theme was, I remember it well, the idea of women in
nineteenth century thought. Another was "the costs of freedom."
These topics were not my ideas; graduate students thought them up.
They were to be explored in the thinkers or artists (Burke,
Nietzsche, or whomever) taken up in my lectures. The TA could
assign readings from those authors which illuminated his topic
rather than the exact texts on my reading list. Thus the
satellite seminars followed my course lectures, but on different,
parallel tracks.

Lage: How closely did you supervise the teaching assistants?

Schorske: Only in the beginning. I supervised them only to a degree—we
certainly had a detailed discussion—what do you want to do? I
would try to help them flesh out their problem, but it was not my
problem any more. The only obligation they had was— behind this,
there were the lectures; they were supposed to come to these
lectures. The students too, though 1 never cared about
attendance. The notion was, 1 gave my history course, and they
took a loosely affiliated course that used my lecture as a
background- -one that would be much more intensive on a particular
question than mine.

Lage: How close was their spirit to yours?

Schorske: At the time I thought it was wonderful. But I don't really know,
because I didn't police them. I did occasionally look at the
papers that came out of it. 1 had hints of the results from the
student end. Even TAs who were not particularly gifted, when they
ran a para-course of their own, could become very effective
teachers. As an added social feature, many met their students not
on campus, but in their own digs. For the undergraduates to go to
the graduate student's own quarters and have beer and meet in the

117

Lage:

evening, or whatever they did, had great appeal. As for me, I
learned from the TAs1 problems. They posed new questions. One of
the graduate students had kind of gotten into Foucault, and he
started to develop some kind of Foucaultian epistemic system of
analysis in his course. It was all new to me, and very
challenging.

Which is very early for all of this, even for considering the idea
of women.

Schorske: Yes. The women's question was hardly up. It was a grad student
of Henry May's, Jacqueline [Reinier] who had this idea. She was
an excellent person. I think she ended up teaching American
Studies someplace. [Early American History at CSU Sacramento]

We issued a mimeographed catalogue for the course, containing
the topics and descriptions of the course seminars that the
teaching assistants were going to give. The students could choose
among these and among the TAs if they knew them. And if they
didn't want to study in any of the seminars, fine; there was the
regular course, with exams that took the form of papers. Thus,
you could just be in the old-fashioned lecture course.

Well, this method really worked for me as long as I was
teaching at Berkeley. I think for the graduate students it was a
maturing experience. But now, down to the theoretical bottom line
in terms of instruction, the important point was that the graduate
student had an intermediate position in two ways. Firstly, he or
she was part of a new culture with new issues. He had questions
on his mind which were on the minds of the undergraduates and
surely not on mine. Secondly, the graduate student was a
preprofessional. He expected to be an historian of whatever he
was going to be, a scholar of some kind. In that sense, he was
with me learning my craft of analysis. He really had a stake in
scholarly procedure and discipline such as an undergraduate does
not have.

The undergraduate doesn't have a career stake in the learning
process. This graduate student always does. Whether he wants to
take it up or not is another question. Most of them do, so they
were really interested in intellectual history and how to learn
its stuff and how to analyze cultural documents.

Lage: They might have been the greatest beneficiaries of all this.

Schorske: I hope so. I think they were. But the combination—the third
circle is the widest, the social, to create an atmosphere of
learning in which the imposed authority of the professor is
minimized.

118

Back to the young lady who followed me out of the lecture
room: you can really call this restructured course a dialogue.
And the teaching assistant was conducting it in his/her rooms, or
some coffee house, or wherever they're getting their results the
way they wish. If the students are really getting into a dialogue
situation that's important, because they have made the choice to.
Every time you make a choice, you make commitment. You can't
avoid it.

So everybody's commitment is raised. Mine is raised to let go
of some of my authority. If you're in authority, you have to
learn now that you will do better by not trying to press your
authority; loosen it. Which was my attitude toward this whole
affair, the revolution in general. Adapt to it in such a way that
the values that are central to your own being and your
professional self-definition or ethos are activated for a new
generation with new techniques of social functioning in the
educational setting. So for me it was just wonderful.

Considering Corresponding Changes in Catholicism

Schorske: And I'll tell you something else. This was the era of Pope John
XXIII, or whatever he was--I always mix the numbers up; Carroll
can correct us. [speaks to Carroll] Was he twenty-two or twenty-
three? [Carroll replies, "Twenty- three, definitely."] John
XXIII: was he in Avignon or one of those places? [Carroll
replies, "One of those places."] [laughter]

Anyway, I was a refugee from the campus strike [Newman
Center], sometimes teaching, I think I told you, in the Catholic
church up on College Avenue.

Lage: During the disturbances.

Schorske: Yes, one of those moratoriums or something. My wife was a
communicant there. I am not religious. But we were both
interested in what was happening to the church. Some thought it
was falling apart, and some thought it was being rejuvenated.
This is what always happens in revolutionary situations; you don't
know whether you're involved in decadence or in a great springtime
of life, renewal. That was what was happening in the university
at Berkeley. The renewers and the decayers, those two visions
produced the same sort of confusion as to where things were going
in the church as in the university.

I thus became very interested in the reforms that were
happening in the Catholic Church. They involved decentralization
and redefinition of authority. (We've discussed it for the

119

university). I thought it was extraordinary. The Catholic
reformers were trying to decentralize the church, to put much more
of what had been papal power in the hands of the clergy,
especially the bishops, who were being organized in different
national groups. Playing down the Pope and the Vatican
bureaucracy that had always run things from Rome seemed like
paring down the central power of the Regents, president and the
state-wide headquarters in University Hall. This was coupled with
a new movement for participation by the laity in the church, which
could be compared to the movement for student participation in the
university.

Decentralization was, in varying degrees, a psychological
threat to everybody in the church. The people who didn't have
authority had to learn that they would have 'to take it up
responsibly. They would have to protect the values of the church
universal in local settings in which new things were going to come
up, and were already coming up, that involved the weakening of
their authority too, because they couldn't rely on headquarters
anymore, et cetera. So that's just the political and
institutional side of a spiritual change.

But take the liturgical side. That was so intriguing to me.
I got interested in it because I've always been interested in
civic ritual and religious ritual, the relation of theater and
religion. All these questions play into my view of history. Now
it seemed relevant to teaching. Vatican II reversed the
historical trend in the church that was increasingly centralistic
and authoritarian since the Reformation. The high altar in the
Counter-Reformation got higher and higher, and everything became
more centralized. The priest had his back to the congregation and
addressed God on their behalf, but the people did not contribute.
They just sat there. Remember my student: "and they call that a
dialogue?" Vatican II turned this around literally. It made the
priest face the people across the altar, which was a simple table,
ideally at the center of the church, not at one end of it. Priest
and people should be co-celebrants. They're all sitting at the
same table. Its a reproduction of the communion at the table in
the Last Supper.

Lage: This was going on at the same time?

Schorske: Vatican II ran from 1960 to 1965.

Lage: That's a nice correspondence with the Berkeley crisis.

Schorske: The aggiornamento was felt in Berkeley, because the university

parish (Newman Center) was run by Paulist fathers, who were both
progressive and very smart. Even in the architecture of their new
building they began to reflect the new ideas of the Church and its
democratized ritual. It was one of the first churches that didn't

120

focus on the high altar; it is built so that everybody was brought
to the altar as a table instead of being separated from a high
altar by a priest.

It doesn't sound like anything that has anything to do with us
in the university. But then to go back to the Reformation and see
what happened. The Protestants made the service revolve around
the Word rather than the ritual sacrifice of Christ, so the
preacher is the big thing. The authority of the Word, the books,
is interpreted for the people by the minister. I don't want to
get too much into religious history, but the fact is that even
church architecture reflects it. If you go to a Presbyterian
church, a traditional one, you will find that there is a row of
seats for the presbyters between what remains of the altar and the
congregation. Milton said, "New presbyters are old priests writ
small," because he was even more low church than the Presbyterians
and didn't believe in having those elders (presbyters) who are
always overlooking the minister from the front row of seats. The
center is not so much an altar as a lectern. The Word delivered
by the minister who is its interpreter substitutes for the old-
style Catholic priest, who officiates at a sacrifice with his back
to his flock. The minister, unlike the priest, always looks at
his audience: but he's the authority still. There's no dialogue
there either.

So I felt this was lesson number two for the university
teacher: start loosening up your authority as a professor
delivering the word. The primacy of lecturing (preaching) in
teaching is ceasing to be, well, as the Germans say, the only road
to salvation, "das alleinseligmachende Mittel." "This is not the
way you can go."

Lage: So these are things that you were thinking at the time?

Schorske: I did. And I brought them directly to bear. I did not fool
around. I told my classes about this: that the return to
participatory community in Vatican II--in which ecumenically
minded Protestants were also interested—had some relevance for
the university. As I taught the nineteenth century, I could point
to the Oxford movement, and how university people in the 1830s, or
1820s, or 1840s in England suddenly looked to the historical and
spiritual (not the political) example of the Catholic Church in
trying to reform the university and society.

How did these students from backgrounds in Birmingham and
Manchester, where all the great collections are even to this day
in pre-Raphaelite painting, how did they get all involved with the
Oxford movement, which is high church and regression to
Catholicism, though they often came from evangelical homes? Well,
if you take up a problem like that, if you examine the nature of
the social currents of religion, both Protestant and Catholic, you

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can see how that university culture is affected too by larger
social and cultural change.

Rethinking and Adapting Academic Traditions

Lage: So these are things you were discussing in your class and tying to
the cur rent --

Schorske: Sure. But not relating too closely past tendency to our own. One
tries to find reciprocal illumination of past and present, where
differences count. I myself was having retakes on everything.
You have to understand that it wasn't only students who were
undergoing changes. We too in the faculty were undergoing
changes. How do we work? Bob Brentano will give you another
whole set of new concerns and problems in teaching. Every
ingenious, committed teacher was having his own, "I have to
rethink. I have to see: Is there some way?" This hasn't got to do
with converting to a movement, it has to do with adapting a
tradition both intellectually and rhetorically to a new situation,
in which the forms in which we communicate learning and even the
ways in which we make innovative steps intellectually, whether
inside or away from tradition, can be made acceptable to another
kind of student culture. We have to think it through. The
bigness of the university, itself a problem, made it impossible
for the faculty to do this collectively.

The devolutionary conception of education I was searching for
involves being aware that if you are a messenger of your gospel- -
in my case, intellectual history—then you jolly well better
temper the kind of claims that cling to your whole professional
style, that have validated your authority; that is not the same as
an intellectual validation. In searching for a new teaching
method or a new rhetoric, the thing you have to hang on to is your
sense of what is intellectually secure. And where you have
doubts, you reveal the doubts. Where you see paradoxes in your
own presentation and thinking, you reveal them.

Let me make it very clear: I did not stand there thinking
every time I spoke a sentence about all these inner things going
on. But in a general way, I too and my colleagues were swept up
in something like re-visioning the function of the university and
the way in which our presentation of the substance and ethic of
learning should be conveyed to a changing student culture.

Lage: Now was this institutionalized, even to the extent that it was
taken up as a departmental concern, or was this individual
professors?

122

Schorske: No, it was individual professors, except where new colleges or

experimental programs like Strawberry Canyon were concerned. One
of the great weaknesses in this department, in all departments
I've ever been in, practically nobody ever has educational
discussions. Practically nobody even has discussions of history
as a substantive discipline in history departments. Go to the
science departments; this vacuum is unheard of. People have--I
told you- -bag lunches; students and faculty read each other's
papers .

My department at Princeton was much more active always than
Berkeley in this, for we have occasional seminars or workshops
organized for us to present our papers.

Lage : But this didn't happen here.

Schorske: No, and I never thought of doing it here either. But the point is
that there isn't much educational discussion, here or at Princeton
or elsewhere. One becomes aware who else is doing what, and then
you can talk privately. You can hardly do it unless somebody
thinks of addressing curricular questions, where someone says,
"Now look. We have a requirement about so many courses of a given
type for a major. Why don't we organize these courses
differently?" In the Berkeley department, there was one very
great, positive, forward step in my time here. We instituted the
103s, the undergraduate seminars.

Lage: But that was even before FSM.

Schorske: I think it was before FSM. It's not a product of the affair; it
began earlier. But I think I was here when it started. And talk
about dialogue; it really went on in those 103s. It was like a
graduate seminar in the best sense. When I got to Princeton, even
my satellite seminars turned around, because we have a system in
Princeton where regular faculty members serve as section leaders,
as well as graduate students. So I had senior professors as TAs
in my course. Sometimes they came from other departments. If
they were willing to serve, they would be my section leaders.

Lage: That's quite a change.

Schorske: Some of the best people in German literature were teaching in my
course. I had an architect--. Well, the satellite seminars were
ideal for the interdisciplinary subject of intellectual history,
especially at a certain moment when Princeton too underwent its
troubles.

After a while, however, the interest fell away, the experiment
didn't work any more; professional disciplinary identity
reasserted itself, and it was only history graduate students who
were doing the satellite seminars. Soon they didn't want to be

123

bothered with devising special themes for their sections. The
mission had ceased to be relevant as the old order reasserted
itself. The situation changed, so you couldn't go pushing forward
with making graduate students go to a great deal of work to devise
separate reading lists. They had to familiarize themselves
quickly with other writings of the authors I assigned, all these
complicated things. You couldn't ask that of people any more if
they didn't feel that they had a stake, if they didn't see that
they were doing something very new that was enlarging their
autonomy. They didn't want enlarged authority; they wanted to fit
in as fast as possible, get their degree and get out of there, and
get a real job. That's the new ball game.

Media Representations of Berkeley Teaching: "Berkeley Rebels"

Lage:

Schorske:

You left Berkeley, so perhaps you aren't aware of what remained at
Berkeley from the new initiatives, but what do you think was
retained from all this?

I don't really know, and 1 hope you'll get those answers from
other people, those who stayed. I'm really not capable of
answering that question. 1 know things like, for example, Charles
Sellers, who was one of the most inventive teachers we had. He
lost his interest afterward, I understand, and I'm very sorry to
hear it. He retired early, went into politics. He wasn't
adequately respected, in my opinion, in the faculty, in the
history department, or in the university; but as an educator, he
was a powerhouse .

For undergraduate sections in his larger courses, Sellers had
students working on sources in a way that very few instructors had
ever done. I heard Bob Brentano talking this morning about a plan
he'd been involved with for grade school experiments to mix
anthropological techniques and historical source utilization in
educating grade-schoolers in other cultures. Dazzling! These
things go on all the time You often don't know who's doing it or
when. Sellers I know was very inventive. But I doubt that most
faculty changed their teaching ways at all. Leon Litwack was a
very ingenious instructor. I encountered him by accident
yesterday having lunch. We recalled a terrible episode that I may
have mentioned to you about that CBS documentary "The Berkeley
Rebels." Did I talk to you about that?

Lage:

Schorske:

On the phone, but we didn't tape anything about
Rebels."

'The Berkeley

The film was interesting. Yet it was a very bad scene in many
ways. Basically, it was a first attempt to be sympathetic to the

124

students in the public medium of television. Harry Reasoner was
the narrator; how much he had to do with making the program, I
have no idea. They came here. I was a kind of teacher-hero in
that film. They showed a lot of things about the FSM. Many of
them were romanticized. Things 1 can remember [laughs]: two of
the FSM leaders riding bareback on horses on a beach or something.
Uncanny.

But whatever. The video-makers projected what were
purportedly two views of instruction at Berkeley, the right way
and the wrong way. One was my course, and the other was Leon
Litwack's course, which I think he gave jointly with Sellers at
the time. We were in fact working along different lines for the
same end. Litwack and Sellers got a new idea for increasing
dialogue in the huge introductory course in American history.
They would get the professor's lecture projected into little rooms
in which the teaching assistants would conduct discussions of the
lecture after it was received. Thus the students had a chance to
talk about what was said in the lecture and relate this to the
reading and so forth.

As for me, the producers cast me as a good lecturer with
immediate rapport with class. They showed me at an unusually high
moment in the classroom, in full flight. I was lecturing on
Hegel. They picked up some witty line--"the way things work with
Hegel, God must be a narcissist." I remember this line coming
through on the TV screen, something you think of in the middle of
a lecture, you know. [laughter]

Thus I was pictured as having total engagement with the
students, because they picked a moment when I had cracked a joke.
So it looked as though I was really Mr. It as an instructor.

Then they showed Litwack in Wheeler Auditorium or some huge
hall where Americanists have to teach because their audiences are
so big, lecturing to his class. They chose a moment when he was
reading statistics about, I don't know, the demographic changes in
the Middle West — something which, in isolation, can only seem
impossibly dull.

Lage: So they just picked a bad moment, because he's quite a fine
lecturer.

Schorske: He's a fine lecturer, he's a wonderful lecturer. So it was just
dirty pool. Even worse, they totally distorted the experiment
with video in the sections. They put the camera on a carriage or
whatever you call that, a dolly, and they moved it down the
corridors of seminar rooms or little classrooms, showing through
the doors as it went people incarcerated in these small, darkened
rooms, looking at a television screen, just looking there,

125

receiving this lecture with its statistics, one room after the
other. It was going down death row in education! [laughter]

And of course I knew what Leon Litwack's teaching was like and
what his experiment was meant to do, to open the lecture to closer
criticism. He told me yesterday, for the first time, he thought
it was one of the worst educational experiments he'd ever done.
He thought it was a total failure. But at the time he was
outraged by the unfair treatment he'd received, as we all were in
the history department. It was so gross- -

Lage: The treatment in this film?

Schorske: Yes, in the film. But he felt fundamentally they were right. He
had himself, he told me yesterday, gone to these little rooms
where the discussion was being held, and he felt it didn't work.
You can't discuss in that situation with the time that is allotted
to a section meeting, fifty minutes or something. You can't do
any kind of a job. It was dull to sit there to look at a tape,
when you could have been sitting in a big hall listening to a live
person. He said after that year, he never did it again. He was
very angry at the piece of lecturing they picked out, but he was
not at all angry with the critique, which he shared, of the
failure of this experiment.

Well, that's the way it is. Some experiments work and some
fail. In what comes forth as a public representation of the
effort at what works and what fails, this poor guy looked as
though he, Leon Litwack, was just the fellow Savio had been
talking about in the "Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate" speech.

Lage: It's ironic that they picked him, I would think.

Schorske: I know. And how that happened, who knows? So why pick me? All

those accidents go on every which way. But the episode shows how
even the supposedly sympathetic media—how few they were!--
misunderstood and misrepresented efforts to counteract
impersonality in the teaching of large classes.

Architectural Re-formation

Schorske: I want to say one thing more, because it related to educational

reform too. As you know, I was interested in the architecture and
spatial structure of the campus in relation to the teaching
mission as well as to public assembly and university ritual. But
on the architecture, I felt we would come a cropper on this campus
with our numbers always expanding. No matter what happened, we
were always growing. Because the buildings weren't right for what

126

it seemed to me we needed in the educational system. I was a
believer not, as the students tended to be, in medium classes, no
more big lectures. I thought there ought to be more big lectures,
if anything. Only the best lecturers should lecture—very hard to
introduce politically into a faculty, you can imagine. I felt
that we really needed to say that some education can be done
effectively by the lecture method; yet a lot of education cannot
be done well unless you get down either to the tutorial or the
seminar size, where the discussion can really go on.

Lage: And then you have the problem of the mass education in the large
public universities to contend with.

Schorske: Right, and then you have the buildings. You have the terrible

problem of the buildings. Look at the classroom design: classroom
after classroom has forty seats, thirty-five seats, something like
that. They're all in a row, and the professor is in front-- just
the authority we have finished trying to turn in a more dialogical
direction. Do not denigrate the great lecturer, which every
academic institution can use. Let him speak in a big hall where
his dramatic quality counts even more than in a small setting. If
you lectured with brilliant rhetoric to eighteen or thirty people,
it's not half as efficient as if you've got a hundred sitting
there. But the architectural problem is mind-boggling. Your
buildings are arranged with the middle-sized class as the norm:
too small for the mass-enrollment courses, too large and badly
laid out for discussion. To find a space and to reorganize this
space flexibly in accordance with changing student body size and
changing educational needs--.

Lage: Was that something you brought up at the time?

Schorske: I tried to push this with Chancellor Meyerson, emphasizing that we
should think growth, educational reform, and forms of building
together. In twenty- five years, you will take the insides out of
several classroom buildings of some importance. And you can begin
thinking about how the wall partitions are constructed. Get your
engineers to go around, look at the buildings, and see what walls
are easily removed; and what walls can go up easily: where there's
now a space that holds fifty people, it might make two seminars.
You can take out the fixed chairs, throw them away, and you put in
a table, which is what you should teach at in a seminar where
equality is needed and exchange is essential. Not one person
standing and the others sitting down; you're all around a table.
In spatial thinking, as in that about teaching authority and
forms, I was stimulated by the architectural changes that
accompanied the historical and the present day reform of religious
practice.

Lage:

Oh, I see. The altar.

127

Legacies of the Sixties; Institutional and Intellectual

Lage: You really were stimulated a great deal by these ten years you
were here, it sounds like.

Schorske: Oh, terrifically. I have to say that from the day I first came to
the Berkeley campus, stimulus was the name of the game. And
yesterday in a walk through the campus, you say, "Did the sixties
do anything?" Well, it was Just the same Berkeley campus. But
why are all these Asian and black students coming to the Berkeley
campus? This is an achievement of the sixties; nobody would have
believed this possible. In my university, we work like mad to
recruit minority students. We have a higher proportion of black
students than you do, but the recruitment effort, the money that
goes into doing this! Well, it was the civil rights movement on
the outside, but also the action on the inside that has brought
policies for enlarging the talent pool in the university with
minorities. And now the counterattack is undermining these gains,
especially in California.

In a place like Princeton and many other places, getting women
there, boy did it make a difference. Now they don't make any
difference; they're just Princeton undergraduates, bright or dumb,
like every other male. [laughter] But they're there. And the
bright ones are there. And the talent pool is wider, so there are
more bright people, more people able to profit from this, or to
learn and reject, whatever they may do.

But if you look at the legacy of the cultural-political
movement in which Berkeley played a large part, this was a pay-
dirt movement, despite some of the horrors that it caused and the
lives it broke. I feel for some of those migrants, the Telegraph
Avenue bums, whom we still see. People sometimes very old now,
thirty years after the events, still lingering around. I'm sure
you find them in the hills too, It's just sad.

Responding to the Postwar Shift to Formalism

Lage: Now did this era also affect your writing and the directions you
took in history?

Schorske: It's very hard to say. I don't honestly think it did very much
except in my teaching and my ideas of the university. My second
intellectual and scholarly formation, reformation, took place in
the fifties. It took place at Wesleyan, not here. My new
mission, my particular mission in cultural history, I discovered

128

there in another situation, one also very fraught with politics,
as was the one in Berkeley.

It had to do with--l don't know how far to get into it--the
impact of the Cold War on academic culture. It had to do with the
fact that in American scholarship during the postwar era, and in
particular in the era of McCarthyism and the anticommunist
crusade, the tendency in the disciplines in the humanities and
social sciences was to dehistoricize themselves. History was, of
course, the least affected by this trend. Yet I saw the
historical mode of understanding among the educated threatened by
formalism and scientism.

I've just written this up in the last Issue of Daedalus
magazine, what the fifties meant.3 The social sciences became
scientized, quantified, and so forth, in an attempt to achieve
maximum objectivity and to disengage from ideological and value
commitment as much as possible.

The humanities, for their part, went into formalism. This is
the fifties: the great era of the New Criticism. Formalism in
literature meant dehistoricization and desocialization. So the
humanities become desocialized, the social sciences become
dehumanized, and the over-arching conceptual frame for this is a
rigorous formalism. Neither one is paying attention to the
interaction between formal thought and social or cultural
experience.

I saw that my job as an intellectual historian--! always
wanted to be one but I didn't think of it this way until the
fifties—was to find some way of demonstrating the historical
character of formalism itself—not just today, but in the past as
well. You cannot escape history; you are part of it even when you
try to reject it. At the same time, I wanted to broaden
historical work, to tell the historians that you cannot go on
always using other disciplines and their materials merely as
illustrations of what are essentially political or social
historical developments that the historian knows before he reaches
for these other fields, whether they be philosophy, psychology,
the arts, whatever. With new analytical methods developed in the
dehistoricizing disciplines, the historian has to pay more
attention to the theoretical and formal aspects of the subjects he
incorporates, and not just to reduce them to illustrations.
Rather he must weave other fields into the fabric of historical
development, cognizant of the analytical principles that people
who reject history have shown to be illuminating.

3 See the Daedalus issue in expanded book form: Thomas Bender and Carl
Schorske Op. cit. 3-16, 309-330.

129

Lage:
Schorske;

Lage:

Schorske:

Lage:

Schorske:

Lage:
Schorske:

You talk about Muscat ine. He was one of the colleagues who
shook me out of historistic slumbers. Muscatine and I had it out
at Wesleyan when he was a refugee there, before I ever came here,
at the time when he was a very strong New Critic—he was a Yale-
trained person—even though he was working in medieval literature;
I, on the other hand, was a strong historicist. He was the guy
who showed me that you jolly well better look at how this poem is
constructed before you start using it to illustrate your history.
It's more than an illustration; it has its own life, and here's
the way to analyze it. And history unaided cannot grasp it.

So he was an important figure in some of your thinking.

He was a very important figure in my intellectual development. It
isn't only he; this place [Berkeley] was full of people with whom
this discourse could be constructed, where the formalists
themselves were not radical rejecters of history. Of economists,
this was less true, and I lost my touch with the social
scientists. I had allies among the social scientists, and some of
them remained socially oriented. Someday there will be an
analysis of who was on what side in these—

What about Philip Selznick, whom you mentioned earlier?

Selznick was one of the people with whom I found it easy to have
understanding. He was in the sociology of law. He had a little
institute for that. He was socializing the legal discipline, and
was thus partial to history. Partly because of this mindset, he
was on my side during the FSM. If you go to the other side of the
sociology department, there were the behavioral scientists such as
Charles Clock and Kingsley Davis.

Selznick had left, had he not?

No. He didn't leave.

Who am I thinking of here? Oh, Seymour Lipset.
sociologist or a political scientist?

Was he a

He was a sociologist—a political sociologist [in the Department
of Sociology] .

Glazer, Nathan Glazer [in Sociology].

Nathan Glazer- -they all left. Louis Feuer [in Philosophy and
Social Science}. He left. These are all ex-Marxists, and hence
were inclined to see the student movement as profoundly
subversive.

Lage:

Did you have any interchange with them?

130

Schorske: Yes. I did with Lipset.
Lage: Because he left denouncing--

Schorske: I did not know Glazer then, but Lipset I knew well, and Meyerson
was close to Lipset. I told you about Meyerson1 s catholicity.
Here is an example of it. To a final dinner that Meyerson gave
when he was going out as acting chancellor he invited my wife and
me and the Lipsets. We were opponents in the events at Berkeley.
Lipset was not on the Emergency Executive Committee, but he had
very close advisory relations to Meyerson.

When I talk about the behavioralist sociologists, the
quantifiers, my wife worked for one.

Lage: Neil Smelser?

Schorske: No, for Charles Clock. But she worked for Smelser too. He was

not the same kind of survey research sociologist as Clock. He was
a Parsonian theorist. He was the heir apparent to Parson's
legacy, which comes from Max Weber. And that was growing big in
this country in the fifties, and Smelser became its main exponent.

Anyhow, I shouldn't get off on this. The taxonomy of forms in
which scholarship is conceived, whether the role of history is
accounted for or not, also provided some kind of key, not
foolproof, to the way in which people divided over the campus
issues. You could not--

Lage: You went into that a little bit in talking about political science
in our first interview.

Schorske: Okay, well then sociology was another instance. Political science
was the clearest and most drastic case of the correlation between
method and political outlook. But sociology was a runner up; it
was very tough in the sociology department for the behavioralists
and more historical analysts to communicate with each other on
campus issues. We didn't have that trouble in history, thank God,
because we're such an intellectually loose discipline.

Difficulty of Constructing the Grand Narrative: Fin-de-siecle
Vienna

Lage: Now, just to get back to our earlier question, your own direction
was set in the fifties. Do you think the climate in the sixties
affected your choices in your historical work?

131

Schorske: I don't think much. It expanded the interdisciplinarity of my

research, but it did one thing to me: it softened me up about the
validity of conceiving history as a straight narrative if it was
going to address the very tough problems of the relation between
historicism and modernism, which became my problem, I never
abandoned it. How could one historicize the antihistorical or
ahistorical culture of the modernists?

Schorske: I worked madly trying to write a narrative history about Vienna
that would have all these f ields--politics, art, music,
psychology, literature, et cetera—and still keep a clear
narrative structure. Partly it was a failure. I was not able
intellectually to construct an integrated narrative history out of
the multidimensional material 1 was working on. I resigned myself
in the end to using the post holing system, to using here--

Lage: Post hole.

Schorske: Yes. You know what a post hole is.

Lage: Yes.

Schorske: You sink a shaft in this area and in that area. It's all the same
subsoil. The posts that you put in these holes can be bound
together and so on and so on, but the exploration, essentially,
and the anchorage, the provision of anchorage, is an independent,
autonomous exercise to resign oneself not to thinking in terms of
the grand narrative, but to think of the essayistic approach. I
use essay in Nietzsche's sense, or in the literal French sense:
it's a try. It's the college try, you know? That I resigned
myself to it was partly because my life, partly because my multi-
disciplinary problem, dictated it.

Lage: But was it also a philosophical view that things didn't fit
together?

Schorske: Well, it--I can never tell, I will be very honest, I can never

tell whether it was a personal failure to achieve the fit myself
in the way of a narrative sweep, to achieve a traditional form of
historical book, or whether it was that I was myself a modernist
and was in fact caught in a world in which my insistence on the
autonomous nature of the cultural fields, of the parts, was
forcing me to recognize that the whole could only be found in the
subsoil below and the heavens above but not here on the surface
[pounds table] --where I was supposed to be doing the work,
[laughter]

And you will be amused at this, but in the end I found
confirmation of my essayistic method in France, after my

132

retirement. It started already in New York, where I discovered
Milan Rundera, the novelist, who was very big in the seventies, a
Czech emigre, as you know, who lived in Paris. 1 discovered this
man's work. One of my students gave me several of his books. The
first of them, The Joke, was in German, out in translation. He
was still on a narrative thing. He then began to fragment; his
novelistic forms began to evolve into separate episodic or
thematic units, as my forms did.

My first book had been a well-crafted book--my revised thesis
--on German socialism in the traditional mode, but I paid a lot of
attention to making it hang together. I tried to integrate
sociology, ideology, and politics, and I had advisors who helped
me with that when I published it, Oscar Handlin being the chief.
But after wrestling with Vienna's more complicated culture for
several years, I began to say "No, you can't do this as a straight
narrative this time." Then to find Kundera coming to the same
conclusion- -boy , it was a shock and an encouragement! Maybe this
world shouldn't be--you shouldn't try to say what you want to say
in your moment in history with the old means.

So 1 say that's the positive side, that 1 know my essays are
complete as autonomous but related entities. I know that people
find in them--my original idea—that substratum of social
experience that makes cohere people in fields of thought as
diverse as are involved in my Vienna book,* from politics to
psychoanalysis and back.

But the other possibility is that somebody else could have
made a consecutive narrative and I couldn't, that it was a
personal failure. Which of these is true, I do not know. I have
had to live with the result and at least have had the consolation
that modernism, which was my subject, was fundamentally
fragmented; that the things and values that had made it possible
to see the world as coherent in some integrated relation of logic
and life were evaporating from the scene, and that consequently my
own sense of cultural coherence was to be found through a poly-
focal perspective on the modern and historical worlds.

You can ask, then, "How do you make form out of substance?"
You use new, pluralistic forms for new substance. That's the
positive way of evaluating my work. The other is to say "You
wanted to make a narrative form, the 'proper1 form for a time-
subject to be understood, and you didn't succeed. So what you've
left us is a bunch of fragments. What's meaningful about that?"

Lage: I appreciate the way you've explained it. It's very accessible.

Tin-de-siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Knopf, 1979).

133

Schorske: So Berkeley was a place where I could pursue rigorously an
education in the autonomous disciplines I needed for my
multifaceted approach. Yes, I say rigorously because of the
wonderful people around: Kuhn who worried this in some way, Cavell
in philosophy, Kerman in music, Politzer in German literature;
colleagues in the history department. I mean, for the stuff I
told you about religion, I never should leave [William] Bouwsma
out: Bouwsma 's grasp of Protestantism, and especially his Venice,
which he finished, I guess, after I left Berkeley. But never
mind. I learned about religion from Bouwsma, from May, from other
people here. I learned about architecture and city planning from
Meyerson, who was in that field, and from Berkeley's fine
architectural library. I mean, let's say if I was falling into
parts, the pursuit of those parts — the post holing—was something
I really could do with faculty in Berkeley in a major way, and I
did. That was why it was a growth opportunity for me
intellectually.

Leaving Berkeley for Princeton, 1969

Lage:
Schorske:
Lage:
Schorske :

Lage:

Schorske ;
Lage:

Now we need to move to the final set of questions.

All right.

Why did you leave?

Well, that was complicated. Several things. I will be frank
about it: I had gotten involved in the crisis here (the anti-
Vietnam War movement as well as the university problem) to the
point where 1 was feeling to some degree eaten up. It did not
have to do with what was wrong with the place, but it did have to
do with my deep emotional engagement with it. Where would I be
when the ship was on an even keel again, or if it didn't get on an
even keel again? I felt that I had a sort of constituency that
was putting me in a position where some faculty members expected
of me things that, in the last analysis, I was not prepared to
give. The cost for my research--! 'm such a slow worker that you
have to put that into the equation. And a slow grower. The
psychic cost for one not temperamentally suited to conflict was
very high.

They expected your time?
time?

Are you talking about demands on your

They expected my involvement; that meant time—and more,
In all the political and governance issues.

134

Schorske: Yes, in what was going on in the university. And to say that such
expectations came to me only from without is wrong. I added to
them myself. So it's a mixture. It was social pressure and
internal pressure—internal ambition, if you wish, but not to
become an administrator. I never wanted that. But to pursue
somehow the degree of faculty involvement I had contracted when I
was already in my mid-fifties was too much.

Lage: So your work was suffering.

Schorske: My work suffered greatly in this period.

So why did I leave? It came about almost by accident. In
1968 I took a year off to go to the Institute for Advanced Study
to catch up in research. And I did partly; I did another leg of
work on my Vienna study. But then I had an offer from both
Princeton University and the Institute. The two institutions went
together: you became a regular professor at Princeton, they said,
and for three more years you can continue as an Institute member
for half of each year. So I had a complete deal that was very
rare. I found it enormously tempting because—well, for the
reasons I've given you. Berkeley was taking too much out of me,
even if I was to some extent at fault for that. I desperately
needed the clear time and the quiet for my book that was already
over ten years in the making.

Lage: When you got away, did you get more perspective on the UC

experience, or on California as a place compared to the East?

Schorske: Oh, I think my views were already formed. I didn't reform them,
no. I certainly was interested in how the two different
institutions worked. I had an educational opportunity in
Princeton that I didn't have here, but I didn't know that when I
left. In the end, I could build up my own program in European
cultural studies, which I had tried to do with colleagues here in
another form—one of the documents I gave you talks about these
efforts within the history department here, which were rejected.

Lage: Oh, that was rejected? That proposal for a graduate program in
cultural history? [See Appendix H]

Schorske: That proposal was rejected. It didn't have any appeal to

Muscatine; but above all it didn't have any real appeal to the
history department except for the intellectual historians. It had
some support in the history department, but they refused to let us
go out and get money for it.

[Hans Rosenberg led the attack in the department, arguing that
a special program in cultural history in which graduate students
received allocated fellowships would privilege that field over
others. Nick Riasanovsky argued in vain that if students in

135

cultural and intellectual history were financed from new funds, it
would free fellowship money for others. I remember his words "All
ships rise on the same tide." But Rosenberg prevailed. He had a
particular distrust of intellectual history as a result of his
German experience. Because Geistesgeschichte. in which he had
been trained, was in Germany often associated with nationalist
ideology, Rosenberg had left this field for social history, where
a more critical attitude toward state and nation prevailed. He
could not but view with distrust an effort to make Berkeley a
magnet for the study of cultural history. His authority, rarely
exercised with such a force of feeling, carried the day. --added
by Professor Schorske during editing.)

That decision by the history department I regarded as the one
blow I ever received from the history department. I did not
anticipate it and found it mortifying, as well as Just plain
wrong .

Lage: And did you recreate the proposal at Princeton?

Schorske: I created something different: an interdisciplinary program in

European cultural studies for undergraduates. The different thing
I did there I couldn't have done here because it involved too many
disciplines, and it was more forward-looking, though very small.
It was an undergraduate program in which almost all the courses
were team taught. Again, I had to go out and get the money for it
in the beginning; then the university took it over. It still
exists. The courses were team taught by one social scientist or
historian and one humanist. It was a program, not a major, and
not a department. It was voluntary on the part of the students,
and they came from all different majors. They wrote their thesis
with their major department, but it had to be on an
interdisciplinary problem. We ran a special seminar for the
senior thesis writers. At Princeton everybody writes a senior
thesis.

It was a terrific teaching experience for me, such as I never
had anywhere else, year after year working with different
partners—great people, such as Richard Rorty in philosophy,
Joseph Frank in Russian literature, and Anthony Vidler in
architecture. Vidler was my principal partner is constructing the
program. Robert Darnton and sometimes Natalie Davis gave a course
with Clifford Geertz, from the Institute for Advanced Study, who
taught year after year without compensation. We had a terrific
growth potential for instructors to keep you alive, Thus, Lionel
Grossman in Romance languages and I gave a seminar on the culture
of Basel in the nineteenth century that opened up a whole new
subject for both of us.

Lage: So those were exciting years too.

136

Schorske: And I couldn't do those here. All in all, I had luck in my three
institutions: Wesleyan, Berkeley, and Princeton. Each gave me
something, each took away something. The general atmosphere here
I could never replicate anyplace else, for social and cultural
stimulation. It's Just mind-bogglingly high here and came at a
time for me when I might have become much more sedentary and
professionally complacent. So it was good for me personally, but
I think in the end my family paid a high price. Again for me, it
was worth it to change to Princeton. I still miss the place
terrifically, as you can tell—and so does my wife.

Lage: Yes.

Schorske: But for my final years of teaching, to keep growing in new fields,
Princeton was a wonderful experience.

Lage: Were the students of a very different quality?

Schorske: No, although the social differentiation of the students at

Princeton was obviously less palpable than at Cal. As far as my
students in intellectual history were concerned, 1 felt that those
at Berkeley were more intellectual, those at Princeton more
academic. The ones at Princeton, however, could be bonded more
easily around intellectual interests. I would like to have done
at Berkeley what Sherry Washburn did for his anthropology
students, establish a little house for them, to give them social
identity. Selznick did it too for his law and society program.
That would make for intellectual learning as I believed in it, but
I couldn't get that out of the history department here. In
Princeton I didn't need it. The students found themselves; they
made a subculture for themselves in the cultural studies program.
I hope they still do. They were an elite because they were self
selected; they got no extra credit for much of their work. They
got course credit, but boy, the work they had to put in for our
program was heavy.

Lage: So they were stimulated as well.

Schorske: Oh. They were great students who stimulated each other. We had
the best faculty and the best students. Well, that's elitist if
you like, but it made my last teaching years a huge pleasure.

Lage: Sounds very nice. Well, is there anything else that you want to
say about this experience in the sixties?

Schorske: No, I don't think so. I think I've said over much.

Lage: When you've read accounts of what happened in Berkeley in the
sixties, do you ever feel that there's something that's just
missed or something you'd want future historians to be sure to get

straight?

137

Schorske: I think that nobody thinks of putting into this what your last
day's questions have pushed forward: what did the sixties do to
your way of thinking about history, about teaching, about the
profession? And I would say that the big item that Berkeley put
foremost on my agenda was that university teaching is a vocation
and not a profession alone. It is a profession with a
responsibility not just to the international community but to the
local community of learning—students as well as professors — in
which one serves.

Among the people I found here, one of the main ones who had a
full sense of learning as a vocation was Sheldon Wolin. He was
not much loved by the faculty here because of his radicalism. But
for me, he was a great moral example as a teacher-scholar, even if
I disagreed with many of his institutional ideas. Another, in
many ways at the opposite remove from Wolin on the political
spectrum, was Ray Sontag, whose commitment as a teacher in my view
transcends his conservative politics both national and, often,
departmental.

The idea of vocation in connection to the scholarly profession
derives from our origins in the medieval university where the
teachers and scholars were men of the cloth. Ours is a clerical
heritage, secularized. In the secularization process, too much of
the moral dimension of our calling was eroded. That was a lesson
I learned at Berkeley that should have been for everybody, but
wasn't.

Lage: And isn't much talked about.

Schorske: No, that isn't talked about, and I wish it were.

Lage: Well, now we have it.

Schorske: No, now we just have on the record somebody who thinks vocation
should have been on the agenda more than it was.

Transcribed by Mary Mead and Estevan Sifuentes
Final Typed by Sara Diamond

138
TAPE GUIDE- -Carl E. Schorske

Interview 1: October 17, 1996

Tape 1 , Side A 1

Tape 1, Side B 13

Tape 2, Side A 24

Tape 2, Side B 35

Tape 3, Side A 48

Tape 3, Side B not recorded

Interview 2: May 5, 1997

Tape 4, Side A 55

Tape 4, Side B 66

Tape 5, Side A 78

Tape 5, Side B 92

Interview 3: May 6, 1997

Tape 6, Side A 100

Tape 6, Side B 110

Tape 7, Side A 131

Tape 7, Side B not recorded

APPENDIX

A Carl E. Schorske, A Life of Learning. Charles Homer
Haskins Lecture, Apr. 23, 1987; American Council of
Learned Societies, ACSL Occasional Paper No. 1 139

B Memorandum to President Kerr and Chancellor Strong on

the suspension of SLATE, August 23, 1961 151

C Letter re use of the university's name, June 11, 1962 154

D Letter re History Colloquium with Herbert Aptheker,

March 13, 1963 156

E Letters re the appearance of Albert Lima on- campus

in July 1963 159

F "Professional Ethics and Public Crisis: A Historian's

Reflections," by Carl E. Schorske, March 1968 166

G List of nominees to Emergency Executive Committee,

December 8, 196A 172

H Proposal for graduate program in cultural history,

December 1965 175

I Carl E. Schorske, Curriculum Vitae 181

139

.Si APPENDIX A

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Milton V. Anastos
Professor Emeritu
and History
University of Calil

1987
Carl E. Schorske
Professor Emeritu
Princeton Univers

REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION
THE AMERICAN COUNCIL OF
LEARNED SOCIETIES

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was a beauteous knight in the best Pre-Raphaelite manner: a
burnished armour with a sensitive, androgynous face, my:
shrouded in misty bluish air.

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radical, H.L. Mencken. Mother accorded a hard won tolera

more for the Teutonic longueurs of Wagner's operas, but non
abrasive virility of Mencken or my father's Shaw.

Recalling hot parental arguments on such matters, I sudde
izcd that, in contrapasing Morris and Wagner in my teaching, I hi
left the family hearth. Freud would say that, here in th
of my professional work as a historian, I was addressing in sul
form a problem of the family scene. In any case, the episode
home to me the power of my family in shaping the cultural intci
symbolic equipment with which 1 came to define my life.
As far as I know, my parents had no deliberate idea of pus
toward an academic career. Autodidacts both, they respected 1
but what they cultivated was not scholarship but a kind of na
tellectuality The concerts, theaters and museums that were thci
tion became the children's education. They fostered our mil
tcrests not just with private lessons but by taking us with them ii
choral societies On my father's two- week vacations we went by
ship on intensive sight-seeing trips: to New England historic site;
Concord or the old ports of Maine; Civil War battlefields wl
grandfather had (• ,ught in a New York German regiment; the gr<
of the East and Midwest from Philadelphia to St Paul.

Along with all the elite cultural equipment, my parents intr
us children, through their lives as well as by precept, to the r
politics My father, son of a German-born cigar-maker, inhen

radical propensities that went with that socially ambiguous tra

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outlook and value system came not from the seminars in modern history
but from an intensive exploration of Greek history with William Scott'
crguson. Despite the fact that 1 was a modernist without usable Greek
Ferguson took me on for an in-depth tutorial. Each week I went to his
iou.se for a two-hour discussion of the books he had assigned, ranging
m the anthropology of pre-political tribes to Aristotle's Athenian Con-
ution or the structure of Roman rule in Greece. For my general ex
amination I prepared a special subject on Aristophanes under Ferguson's
gu,dance-an exercise which enabled me for the first time to ground a
whole literary oemre in a field of social power. Ferguson's critical
tutelage really opened my eyes, as the field of classics has done for so
many, to the possibilities of integrated cultural analysis. It also remained
with me as a model of pedagogic generosity.
The comparative quiet of Harvard's political scene that I found on
my arrival in 1936 soon changed. After 1938, when America began to
face the menacing international situation in earnest, political concern
rcame more general and intense within the univcrsity-and in me
Divisions on the issue of intervention ran deep, and many of us, young
and old, felt impelled to debate it publicly. When political passions run
rong, the relation between one's obligations to the republic of letters
and to the civic republic can become dangerously conflated Two per
sonal experiences at Harvard brought this problem home to me

The first occurred in 1 940 in History I, the freshman course in which
I served as a graduate teaching assistant. Its professor, Roger B. Mer-
riman, a colorful, salty personality of the old school, passionately devot-
rd to aristocratic Britain, believed, along with a few other staff members,
that instruaors had a public responsibility to get in there and tell the little
gentlemen what the war was all about, to make them realize the impor
tance of America's intervention. A few of us, across the often bitter bar

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were Barnaby C. Keeney, later the first director of the National Endow-

for the Humanities, and Robert Lee Wolff, who became professor
Byzantine history at Harvard. Quite aside from the principle involved,
the experience of History I taught me how shared academic values could

sustain friendships that political differences might destroy.

The second experience, of an intellectual nature, left a permanent

my consciousness as an historian The graduate history club had

145

politics and academic culture in the late forties and fifties I would have
encountered them in any university. But only a small college could have
provided the openness of discourse that made It possible to confront the

cultural transformation across the borders of increasingly autonomous

disciplines At Wesleyan in particular, thanks to President Victor Butter-

field's selection of imaginative faculty members at the war's end, an at

mosphere of vital critical exploration prevailed. From my colleagues 1
received the multi-disciplinary education for the kind of cultural history I

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tellectual dilemmas about to appear or the new horizons that opened
with them. Like most returning veterans, whether students or pro
fessors, I felt only a joyful sense of resuming academic life where I had left
it five years before. The freshman Western Civilization course that I was
asked to teach had just been introduced at Wesleyan by assistant pro
fessors fresh from Columbia. For me it was a throwback to my own
freshman year founeen years earlier. Teaching four sections, I had more
than enough opportunity to explore the riches of the course. Once again
I encountered there, in all its optimistic fullness, the premise that the pro
gress of mind and the progress of state and society go hand in hand,
however painful the tensions and interactions may sometimes be.

In framing an advanced course in European 19th-century history, 1
also returned to a pre-war pattern to explore the relationship between
domestic national histories and international development. Even my
European intellectual history course, though fairly original in its com
parative national approach to the social history of ideas, bore the stamp
of the American neo-Enlightenment in which I had been formedat home
and at Columbia. Its central theme was the history of rationalism and its
relation to political and social change. Viable enough for constructing an
architecture of intellectual development before the mid- 19th century,
the theme proved less and less useful as the 20th century approached,
when both rationalism and the historicist vision allied with it lost their
binding power on the European cultural imagination.

In the face of the fragmentation of modern thought and an, 1 fasten

ed on Nietzsche as the principal Intellectual herald of the modern condi

tion. He stood at the threshold between the cultural cosmos in which I

was reared and a post-Enlightenment mental world just then emergent in
America— a world at once bewildering, almost threatening, in its con-

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measure the damage of the Yalta ".ccord and of preventing the permanent
division of Europe Although the Council generously published my
analysis of the German problem, It rejected my policy recommenda

tions. It was my last fling at influencing U.S. policy from within the
establishment.

The swift transformation of the East-West wartime alliance Into the
systemically structured antagonism of the Cold War had profound con
sequences for American culture, not the least for academic culture. It was

not simply that the universities became a prey to outer forces that saw
them as centers of Communist subversion. The break-up of the broad,

rather fluid liberal-radical continuum of the New Deal into hostile camps

of center and left deeply affeaed the whole intellectual community. The
political climax of that division was Henry Wallace's presidential cam
paign in 1 948, in which I myself was active. The bitter feelings it left in its

wake only served to conceal a more general change in climate by which
most intellectuals were affected, namely the revolution of falling expec
tations in the decade after 1947. The coming of the Cold War— and with

it, McCarthyism— forced a shift in the optimistic social and philosophic
outlook in which liberal and radical political positions alike had been
embedded.

Wesleyan was a wonderful prism through which these changes
were refracted. Several liberal activists of the social science faculty, in
cluding non-religious ones, turned to the neo-Orthodox Protestantism
of Reinhold Niebuhr to refound their politics in a tragic vision. Young
scholars in American studies transferred their allegiance from Parrington
and his democratic culture of the open frontier to the tough moral
realism of Perry Miller's Puritans. For undergraduates, a new set of
cultural authorities arose. Jacob Burckhardt, with his resigned patrician
wisdom in approaching problems of power, and the paradoxical
pessimism of Kierkegaard elicited more interest than John Stuart Mill's
ethical rationalism or Marx's agonistic vision. Existentialism, a stoical
form of liberalism, came into its own, with Camus attracting some, Sartre
others, according to their political persuasion.

Nothing made a greater impression on me in the midst of this
transvaluation of cultural values than the sudden blaze of interest in Sig-

mund Freud Scholars of the most diverse persuasions to whom my own

ties were close brought the tendency home Two of my teachers turned
to Freud: the conservative William Langer used him to deepen his

a c -c --- c v 3

mill

147

vealed such impressionistic procedures as woefully inadequate. The
historian thus faced two challenges at once: to show the continued im-

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scholars were rejecting it ; and to do this at a moment when the historian's
own methods of analysis were being revealed as obsolete and shallow by
the very a-historical analytic methods against which he wished to defend
his vision.

For me, the issue first came to focus in dealing with literature. When
1 charged my Wesleyan friends In the New Criticism with depriving
literary works of the historical context that conditioned their very ex

istence, they accused me of destroying the nature of the text by my ex-

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e e. cummings: "let the poem be." But he taught me how to read
literature anew, how the analysis of form could reveal meanings to the
historian inaccessible If he stayed only on the level of ideas, of discursive

content. Other colleagues in architecture, painting, theology, etc.,
similarly taught me the rudiments of formal analysis so that I could utilize
their specialized techniques to pursue historical analysis with greater

conceptual rigor.

By the fifties, the problems I have thus far described— the blockage
in my course after Nietzsche, the changes in politics with the external and
internal Cold War, the dehistoriclzation of academic culture, and the
need for higher precision in intellectual history— all converged to define
my scholarly agenda. I resolved to explore the historical genesis of the
modern cultural consciousness, with Its deliberate rejection of history.
Only in a circumscribed historical context, so It seemed to me, could a
common social experience be assessed for its impact on cultural creativi
ty. Hence, a city seemed the most promising unit of study. Like
Goldilocks in the house of the three bears, I tried out several— Paris,
Berlin, London, Vienna— in seminars with Wesleyan students. I chose
Vienna as the one that was "just right." It was indisputably a generative
center in many important branches of twentieth century culture, with a
close and well-defined intellectual elite that was yet open to the larger

currents of European thought. Thanks to my Wesleyan colleagues, I had
acquired enough Intellectual foundation to embark upon a multi-
disciplinary study.

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Thinking." The graduate T.A. thus became a mediator 1:
fessional discipline and standards in which he had a voc;

the concerns of the new generation of which he was a p
the enlargement of the T.A.'s authority. The satellite s

helped satisfy the felt need for dialogue, which in fact an
might provide; it also set up a healthy dialectic betweer

scheme of my lectures and the ideas and existential
students reflected in each seminar's special theme.

As I followed the intellectual yield of the seminars, I
of the deep truth of Nietzsche's observation that a new

sent opens a new organ of understanding for the past,
have become more widespread, such as Foucault's, fi

there. The satellite seminar system was adopted by a fr
Berkeley and Princeton, and was effective for its tir
seventies, however, when deference to the canonical in

tual and social quiescence returned, it lost its appc
assistants. Well suited to its time, its time soon passed. Ir

scholarship, one must live in the provisional, at
acknowledge obsolescence and to adapt the forms o
changes in both culture and society.

in a single perspective. In my intellectual history of Vienna, 1 had sought
to integrate politics and culture in substance, historical and formal

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reconcile academic autonomy and anti-war activism; in educational

policy, faculty authority and educational renewal.

Those who experienced the university crisis will know how searing

the sense of dissolution can be, even if tempered now and again by a
sease of future promise. I certainly had hopes that a stronger university
community would issue from the crisis, and drew strength from the fine

group of collaborating colleagues who shared my convictions about
both free speech and educational reform. But in the conflict-laden en

vironment, two other, less homogeneous entities made the situation
bearable: my department and my classes.

The history department was deeply divided over the issues of

university policy; more, it contributed articulate spokesmen to almost

every shade of opinion in the Academic Senate. Yet when the department
met on academic business, its divisions on personnel or curricular prob
lems did not follow those in Senate meetings on university issues. I could
expect to find in a colleague who had opposed me on the Senate floor a
staunch ally on a department matter. Professional ethos and collegiaJity
remained intact. How different It was in other departments, such as
politics and sociology, where methodologicaJ divisions tended to coin
cide with and reinforce political faction! My classes, buoyant and in
tellectually engaged through all the troubles, also were a continuous
source of stability. However, the pressures of the crisis caused me to
rethink my teaching.

Once, after a final lecture in intellectual history, I had an experience
that gave me food for thought. My students gave me the customary
round of year-end applause. After all the difficulties of that year, I floated
out of the lecture room on cloud nine. Then, as I walked
down the corridor, I heard a girl behind me say to her companion, in a
voice heavy with disgust: "And they call that a dialogue!" The remark
Jerked me back to earth. Beneath it lay two problems: first, student
hunger for closer relations with the instructor, always present to some
degree, but intensified by the unrest Into a widespread rejection of the

lecture system as ' ' impersonal .' ' Second, the passage of the student revolt
from politics to culture. The gap that had opened between generations in

150

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chronic recovery of a static slice of the past at one end of th
humanistic theory of forms at the other, these recapitul
history itself in the seventies the loss of interest in process a

mation that had marked the new academic culture outside h
fifties. In my Princeton history department, the dominant

was toward the social sciences.

1 am no theorist and no methodologist. My way of ad<
problem of polarization in the sciences humaines and in histc
through teaching— but this time not alone, and not pu
history. A small group of Princeton faculty from different c
joined me in devising an undergraduate inter-disciplinary prc
European Cultural Studies. Its regnant idea was to bring to
same objects of study the separate lights of social scientists, h
eluded, and humanists — the groups that elsewhere were p
apan. All courses in the program were taught in
teams— hopefully one social scientist and one humanist,
scientists other than social historians could be induced to j<
gram. But the seminars did establish a field of discourse relatii
and idealional worlds to each other, despite the autonort
academic culture. In a more personal sense, teaching over
with scholars in philosophy, architecture, Russian, German
literature made of my last teaching decade a quite new 1
perience. From one of the seminars, on Basel in the nineteen
issued a research project with my teaching partner, a study <
concern of my Berkeley years: the relation between univer

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history as essential constituents of its processes. In the last y
reversed the effort, trying to project historical understand!
world of the arts, through work with museums, architecture s

critical writing for the larger public. The venue may change, t
one's engagement alter as one grows older and the worl

Preparing this account, however, has made me realize all too c

have not moved very far from the issues that arose in my form

when the value claims of intellectual culture and the structu

power first appeared in a complex interaction that has neve
engage me.

3 c

L_—

151 APPENDIX B

ouv.

August 23, 19(1

MEMORANDUM TO PRESIDENT l£RR AMD CHANCELLOR STRONG

, '

As you know* vw havo been actively Intorsswd In tha problem of
Student political organisation and activity on campus. Since tha suspension
of SLATE on June 9th, w* have met several tlocs by ourselves end with Other
umbers of the faculty; wo have discussed soao of these problems with students
who have sought our advice and aid; several of us Mere Invited to appear
at the hearing held July 20th by the Coanlttev on Recognition of Student
Organizations; and wa have exchanged views with you on a number of occasions.

tn the light of the nsw directive of July 24th, we thought It would
bo of Interest to you to have our general assessment of the situation es
we see It now.

First* however, we should like to restate the particular Issues that
have concerned us. These have been mainly three:

(a) The suspension of SLATE. Wo wished to affirm faculty Interest
tn this particular case, and to defend SLATE If that seamed necessary and
proper. After study of tho case wo did conclude that SLATE, while marl ting
sorao kind of punitive action, should not be permanently suspended under
the rules In affect prior to July 24, 1961. More specifically. It was our
hope that SLATE would be able to participate In the A$UC elections of the
Pall tern. 1961.

(b) The g«neral problem of fair procedure In the regulation of
student organizations. While we do not think that the administration of
those affairs should be governed by an excess of logallsra, we do feel that
at least the rights of notice and hearing, as well as a due regard for
fairness In fitting the punishment to the crime, should be safeguarded.
The SLATE case does suggest that such procedures have yet to be developed
on the Berkeley campus, it Is our understanding that the Committee on
Recognition of Student Organizations has taken cognizance of this p rob 1 era
and aay have reported on It In connection with Us consideration of the
SLATE suspension.

(c) The Idea of campus political parties. We were concerned lest
the SLATE case, whatever its particular merits, prejudice tha general Idea
that canpus political parties are a useful adjunct to more fomal educational
processes on campus.

' '• •• •*.'.-*

(for understanding of tho Present Situation

t. The new directive of July 24th does allow campus political
parties as "student groups organized exclusively for the election of student
officers and for discussion of student government Issues." We assume this

152

HEMORAKOUH TO PRESIDENT KERB AKD CHANCELLOR STRONQ

Page TWo August 23, 1961

•won* that such groups can enter candidates In student elections, such candidates
being Identified as party candidate*; run a unified campaign; hold rail fas on
campus; end do whatever etse may be reasonable and proper In the light of
their special purposes.

2. The new directive Is silent on the right of other bon?

organizations to present themselves es student political parties running
candidates In student elections. However, It Is our understanding that, at
least on the Berkeley campus, "off-campus as well as otveampus student groups
with faculty advisors end fraternities and living groups are entitled to
sponsor candidates. The only requirement Is that a group be a bona f fdf
student group and that It conform to election rules of the ASUtJ? (Letter
of Chancellor Strong to Professor Selznlck, July 19, I9&1.)

We are delighted by the evolution of this policy. It definitely (
appears that the University Is coamltted to safeguarding the opportunity of
the student body to have a meaningful political experience so far as the
election of student govomnent Is concerned. We are still In sons doubt
regarding the effects of the restriction on holding membership meetings on
can pus, so far as the new category of "off-caatpus" organizations Is con
cerned, and we fear that this may work a serious hardship*
*>

.
i

Sppse Continuing Probleq*

Ma feel It would be of value to the administration, In working out
Its new policies, to give consideration to the following matters which may
be troublesome In the near future.

We welcome the spirit of Chancellor Strong1! statement of July 19th
to the effect that ASUC Itself will deteralne the rules of participation In
student elections. Certainly maximum autonooy for the Associated Students
Is desirable. On the other hand, we assume that the administration will
retain residual responsibility for Insuring that ASUC rules are broadly
consistent with University policy. Including the policy of safeguarding
rights of bonft fide student groups. It may bo das! rabble to anticipate
SOBJO Issues that may arise when ASUC attempts to Interpret University policy
with respect to participation In student elections.

Specifically, If an organization such es SLATE decides not to be a
"student organization authorized to use University facilities for regular
membership meetings and to use the name of the University," it may yet seek
to run candidates In tho student elections as an "off-campus" group. Will
It be able to organize Its campaigns on campus by holding campaign organUing
meetings, rallies, conferences with other groups, etc.? VII) the question
of rules to bbe made by ASUC for the governance of student elections be a
proper campaign Issue? If It Is, will ASUC be allowed to decide whet con
stitutes a 'Wmbershlp meeting?"

apmmpvw

MEMORANDUM TO PRESIDENT KER.1 AND CHANCELLOR STRONG

Page Two August 23, 1961

On a broader level there are some Issues which remain, for us, not
yet clearly resolved. For example, MB feel that the Interpretation of the
State Constitution as restricting student political activity Is questionable and
should receive further study. We have some doubts about the real ISM of tho
assunptlon tht student pronouncements are likely to be confused with the
stand of the University as an Institution. And we contlnueto believe that
all frona .fide., student groups should be allowtd to hold membership mooting* on
canpus, so long as they are engagod in lawful activities serving an educational
purpose. W« hope that both tho administration end tho faculty will from tUae
to time re-exTralno those questions In tho light of experience under the) new
policy; and we offer our earnest support In your efforts to sustain and
extand freedom and responsible citizenship on our canpus.

Our Interest fn tho Issues raised by the SLATE suspension should
not be construed as a general criticism of the University administration.
We are well aware of the liberalizing Measures Instituted In recent years.
Nor are we unmindful of the repeated defense of the University, end of Its
open forum policy, made by tho administration against adverse pressures and
criticism. (In passing wo night note that the very telegram which helped
got SLATE Into so Much trouble was written In praise of the University and
specifically of President Kerr.) We would bo unhappy, and seriously misunderstood.
If our action In this matter In any way looft«ned the broad and f Inqtfaonds that
now exist between faculty end administration.

We have no wish to magnify disagreements. At the same time, we know
you will concur that It Is Important to keep lines of communication open.
As faculty moabors, we try to make ourselves available to the problem* of
students, and we hop* that a dialogue with you, from time to time, wilt be

welcomed as creative and enlightening.

Your* very sincerely.

Van Dusen Kennedy Hanen C. Selvln

Leo Lowanthal Philip Selznlck

•
.

Carl E. Schorske Henry Nash Smith

Charles 8. SelUrs.Jr. Kenneth K. Stampp

• •

154 APPENDIX C

^^ —

June 11, 1962

Professor V. H. Gledt, Chalrmn
Coandttee on Acadenlc Jreedcn
Academic Senate, Berkeley Division
211 fechanies Building
Cenpua

Dear Professor Oiedt:

At its last Meeting, the Berkeley Division of the Acadeaic Senate
pesaed a oense-cotloc expressing its opposition to sections one end three
of the °Breft Statenent ConcernlnE Use of UniTeraity Raae and Facilities
by Faculty and £taff in their Relations vlth Persons and (Jroupe outside
the University."

Since I vas not able to attend that neeting, I should like to take
this means of indicating to you ny support of the sense-antion adopted
by it. It seems of highest importance that ve be allowed to identify
our selves professionally before the public — though clearly not *i
to speak for the University of California.

With thanks for your interest.

Cerl E. Schorskc

CES:hb Professor of History

cc: President Kerr

BERKELEY: DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

Carl-
How about this*

At its last nesting the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate passed a
sense-notion expressing its o-position to sections one and three of the
attached "Draft Statement Concerning tfhe of University Name and Facilities
by Faculty and Staff in their Relations with persons and Groups outside
the Univers ty."

Because all of «s were not there, and because those of us who were prefer
not to lose our identities completely in the anonymity of a voice vote,
we would like, as scholar-citizens distinguished by -toStEe member ship in
the faculty of history of the University of California, Berkeley (though
clearly not ts representatives of the University iiuititmaciiiitmiMUBin as a
corporate body), to indicate our personal support of that motion.

Hutson says that the petition — and any other letters or communications-- should
be sen to Frof. W. H. Giedt, Ch. of the Corar.. on Academic Freedom, 211 Mechanics
Bldg., and that a copy eight be sent to President Kerr.

l.K!Vi.K->; TV v'- CALll OKN1A— 'Lf.i»rj.««J lur

156 APPENDIX D

*rch 13, 1963

Professor J. H. Htynolda,
Ccsnittee on Academic Fraadoa

Acadeaic Senate, Box-there flection

Hear Professor Reynolds:

Z WE tranaadtting herevlth a cooaunlcatlon frcn the Department
of History to the Academic FieaiVsi CosxLtta* of the Senate. Die statement
vas Adopted at the Department 's anting of 8 Ifcrch, 1963, by • -rot* of

27 to 1, vith tvo abrUntion*.

Z should like to add for jrour consideration • fev elements in the
situation not contained in the departnental cosauni cation:

(1) The History Colloquium !• neither a required academic exercise
nor a public function. Invitation IB by caapus mall to the faculty
and by post-card to the students* In the interests of active par
ticipation by students, colloqula are not announced on tjny University
Calendar or to the general public. The topic of each colloquial is
presented by a speaker, vho also Trmnslly leads the discussion sxong
faculty and students.

(2) Outddc speaker E are invited to a colloquium only after vrltten
notice has been sent to the tenure members, with the request that
any objection be registered before a certain date. This procedure
v&s fcllovod in the case of the colloquium for Dr. Apthefcer. One
ne&ber subsequently reported not receiving the notification In this
Instance, though he did not specifically dissent from the invitation.

(3) ?te Chancellor, in apprising B* by telephone on Saturday, February 16,
1963, that the collcxjulun could not be held on caspus, Invoked both
Keguifition 5 and the interpretations thereof as sumnsrlEed in the
University BnT "» rtin. February 13, 1962, pp. 131-132. The Chancellor
in his conversations with ae at no point denied the educational
character of the eolloquiusi, and in general shoved understanding
for the Ifepartaent's position while feeling obliged to deny the use
of University faculties.

(H) The Chancellor made his decision on the basis of an administrative
policy in which politics has primacy. While the Chancellor did not
cite it specifically, the relevant policy vould seen to be that ex
pressed in Regulation 5 aad interpreted by President lerr as follovs :

'to prevent exploitation of its .the University's prestige by un
qualified persons or by those vho vould use It as a platform for pro-
pagenda. ' The latter phrase has been specifically interpreted by
vord and by practice to exclude speeches by aeabers of the CcEsmnlst
Fartgr of the U.8.A." (President Clark Kerr, Beport to the Beoants.
Dec«cb«r 15,

Professor J. E. Reynolds page 2.

(M con't. The Department, on the other hand, is guided by a
policy in vbcih educational and scholarly alms must necessarily
nave primacy. On this occasion, the two policies — political
and educational -- cane into clear conflict. The Department vas
forced either to cancel a legitimate educational function or to
reduce it to an "off-campus" activity. Beither choice vas happy,
but the latter vas, I believe, the only correct one by professional
academic standards. Sinoe tiae did not permit full consultation
of the tenure umbers, Z bear the responsibility for the decision
to remove the meeting to Stiles Ball.

(5) As the logical corollary of the position taken above, it seemed
to ae essential to maintain the scholarly and non-public character
of the Colloquium once it vas removed free the campus. Thanks to
the cooperation of faculty, students and the authorities of Stiles
Hall, this proved to be possible. The colloquium vas marked by
normal scholarly discussion, like any other, despite tbe unaccus
tomed off-campus setting in which it vas held.

Respectfully submitted,

Carl E. Schorske

C£S:fc"D Chairman

enc.

cc: Chancellor Edward W. Strong

To the amende Fgecdoa;

ir !

tte De-p of Historv .ini» on Msrch 8, 1963, voted to call

.litrr.tio'i to

A yaa? > story invited Professor Troukhariovskii

2Z I^£l£li> ^f: 8p' ' i":;C* °*

n of hi atopy preduaiis students and faculty

pic t which r>i'ofes3or Troukhn-

.. .//<*:, an? ion w«s not un-> that permitted him

"aa a pl&iiiorw f c : =,«" rhoupfi it nay be assumed

: :khJ».nov- 'j.f-\, the University administration

consider ^l-.e <.-c-l J.oqu ivan a violation of Regulation Wumber "•>
.

? mt o "iatory invited DTo Herbert Aptheker

to s|i3ct- cn rhr- fvl ;eot of /;n; ilecro hlstoriogrwphy to a colloquium of

jry Kfai'< .jrtta ar:d fa col': : :• Alumni Houses Dr •. Apthokor is

eiiitor of t eoreti<«3 mafasir.a Political Affairs, H<? altjo holds

University snci Ja author oF^^ier'i'can Hegro Slave
• A Dc'Cuiaen^nry 1?*.3 tory of ttie '.'egrn People fn'ijie UniteH
& addlt;ion,~he" has wrfKcn s 978i>aT~aFort s'tucli es of" tne" Negro in

ion, ir the abolitionist movement, and in the Civil WH
raphy, f.herefore , is obvious iy a 4,oolc on which F»r. Apthsker
•.•i . i.; apeak; p. , h- repMs^nta a point of view with which

ts working in American history nead to be fsnsiliaro Tre reasons
j-of'jssor TtoukhanovsMi and tc* Apthsker, and the circumstances
Tneetii>prs, were id«nticsl« In both cas«3 the pyaduatw students and
nf the History fippartriant were rsrspargd for scholarly conti

-.tted to ob%1e^tive exploration rather than political debate o
Two days be f •••:•« IVv Aptheke:: ws tc apeak (Febrc^iT 1^. 1963), Professor Carl

L; ,-fcii Li t;:t- [.vpartramfc of History, received notice from the

i thi? BopfivtTTTent 3 Jr.vitetion i- .hcker

was a violate

r.e last

l«lT>r>5 te Stilfca

>'ie LttpartiTitr.u of : scory r.hat tl

. : . sbovfi i-.>f»v,;;r;<-u- vi'a,? -p. cDear

.an Itsclfc "l^e func uh& Un.

..ic the regulation, "is to seek and trvtnsKt knowledge sno
lite procesa whereby trctt; is to be Mads known Tli.?

. rounded upon fait,, ^lli^ence and knowledfw nnd it inust

ee operation, I", rsust; r ombat «-^rt?r-H

' . a wajr -».j :'O ; . • . > eanpua

.3t hiatorJsn ard a p^-oup o.T lilatcry scradvur5: e stwienta ie,
serious vlo.iitLion of fMwdendLc freedom*

. • ly request thati Vy; f. ; on

^ and cons!

••nplicar ,ty

'.cm }m\<

•. :
T •?

159 APPEND

: 0/ Public Injormatwn

TH 5-6000. -Ext ^7S4

/ .j ^* •"<*•• !Otv

7/22/63 Albrook

FOR RELEASE ON DELIVERY

SCHEDULED FOR 12 NOON MONDAY 7/22/63

Berkeley — Following Is the text of introductory remarks by Professor
Carl E. Schorske, prepared for delivery in connection with the appearance
of Albert J. Lima at Wheeler Auditorium on the Berkeley campus of the
University of California today (Monday):

The interest in this meeting has been high. Both on and off the
campus, people see it as a turning point in the history of our Univer
sity. Why? Some erroneously believe that, for the first time, a
Communist may now speak on campus, and that students will now be
"exposed" directly to Communist ideas. In fact, students have long been
expoeod to these ideas through Communist writings. Moreover, foreign
Communists hove been permitted to speak on campus. So far as Communism
is concerned, this meeting inaugurates a change only in that an
American Communist can now present his ideas in person to the University
community. Our students and faculty can consider, test and weigh
these ideas man-to-man, rather than merely men-to-book. In this sense,
Mr. Lime's presence here today has its educational importance in
enlarging the ways in which our students can acquire knowledge about
Communism rather than in opening such knowledge to them for the first
time .

In a ier^er sense, however, the meeting acquires its significance
from the fact that the Regents, by their resolution of June 21, have
affirmed that self -defining freedom of inquiry on which any university
must rest. Political anxiety about the students has given way to
intellectual confidence in the students. The Regents have wisely
lifted the "ban," not negatively, but positively in their resolution:

"The Regents of the University have confidence in the students
of the University and in their judgment in properly evaluating
any and all beliefs and ideologies that may be expressed in
University facilities by off-campus speakers. This is in the
best American tradition."

So it is — in the best American tradition. For ours is a nation
which was among the first to raise a time-honored principle of the
university—the faith in a free exchange of ideas — into a principle
for a whole society.

It is gratifying to see the reestablishment of that principle
in the University of California in the form of an untrammeled "Open
Forum Policy." We thus join the ranks of America's great institutions
of learning—Harvard , Minnesota, Yale, Wisconsin and many others — in
offering our students, without fear or favor, all that the world holds
in the way of ideas. We know that, whatever their beliefs, the students
will receive these ideas both respectfully and critically, in the time-
honored tradition of scholarly life.

160 BERKELEY: OFFICE OF THE CHANCELLOR

July 23, 1963

' •* y-? .»

Professor Carl E. Schorske
Department of History
3303 Dwinelle Hall
Campus

Dear Professor Schorske:

Now that the "ordeal" Is over I want to express my sincere apprecia
tion to you for taking on this extremely difficult chore of moderating
the Lima meeting.

I have read your thoughtful opening remarks and have heard from mem
bers of my staff and others who were present how well you handled the
entire proceeding. The continued success of the open forum policy
depends on the conduct of the programs, and I am delighted that this
first one went so smoothly. That it did was largely due to your
actions, and you have my sincere thanks.

Sincerely,

E. W. Str

S.v.

161

July 30, 1963

Chancellor Edward W. Strong
University of California
3335 Dwlnelle

Dear Chancellor Strong:

This is to thank you for your generous words of appreciation
concerning my moderating the L"'i"t meeting. Thanks to the help
of the public information office and the maturity of the stu
dents vho attended the nesting, the chore proved to "be not at
all difficult.

I should Uta? to take this occasion to thank you for your
role in lifting the qualifications on the open forum policy.
After learning from Mrs. Strong about the telephone campaignc
to which you have been subjected, I anz-arc sensible than ever
the selflessness that vas Involved in yovr championship of
a full open forum policy.

Sincerely yours,

Carl E. Schorske
CES:of

THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIF

CLARK KERR

President o] the University

RECEIVED 3f

CKANCJUOR-S OFFICE

T--T —

•

BERKELEY 4.CAL1FORN

Jfcly 26, 1963

Mr. Sidney 3. VatU
2371 tnoxvllle Avuue
Long Baa.ch, California

Dear Mr. Watts:

Dr. Max Rafferty has forwarded your letter
of July 20 to oe for

Albert J. Lima's recent speech on the
Borkelay caqpuc of the University of California.
uas oponr.orod by STATE and tike V. E. B.
DuBois Clut>, botli of wliicli are off-conpus
&tuder.t Oi-^Uilaatioat . To iuplfeBei/t Uni-
vercitv policy, th= meeting xt£ itouernte,!
by Dr. Carl E. Schorske, a profo«sor o£
on llii.' Berkeley o

Ycur li.t*rest ir. the University is

appreciated.

- yoora,

Clark Kerr

cc : Dr. Max Bafferty
Chancellor 3tronc

^ be: Dr. Schorske (Via Chancellor Strong)

STILES HflLL

163

University YOUNG MEN'S CHRISJION OSSOCIflTION

STUDENT
OFFICERS

Prnidtn',
GEOFFREY CHANDLER

V Kt Prriljrntt

JOHN T. STRAND, JR
GLENN TAKAGI

5f i rria'tri

CHRi<.TopHr R P. RATCLIFF
MALCOLM THORNLEV, JR.

ADVISORY
BOARD

Honorary Ljfe Mernkrrt

B R Bo» RON

Vt'. R H HODCKIN

CHARIFS G Hvot

Aftttr MrmtT'i

J. CLAYTON OUR. Ckjirmai:

JOHN PACT Ar<TiN

JLMIRMJN A bi A* IR

DA\ n> BLACK* t L i

Icon R Bi AKI

El>* ARM C». CHAM': i P

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JAMIS \X'. DlFl»ni(H ,!n.
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JOHN H ()i» I. i

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>X'|LLIAM M . Rf H
\\ . Hi P'.'N Hi MV( > :

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JOHN A. M-R'-: .

Rohl RI G. SfRt'i i

RLL>*U'SL> D. SIAAIV. JR.

FRI n STRII r

•E:'M- ARII \V. SlRUSl.

CLVDT 1.. SILIIVAN
VJi'AKEnrLH TAYLOR
CHARLES \X'. TOHIA^
HENRY J VAI \
YORI «Af
HAROU. R. Vk AL^
>X'|LLIAM E. \X'A^ll
STATEN >X . NX LP^T IR
KING WILKIN
ARLIK.M T WILLIAM^
GFORGF YAVI'KOCHI

2400 BANCROFT WAY • BERKELEY 4, CALIFORNIA • THornwall 1-6010

July 29, 1963

Professor Carl E. Schorske
3303 Dwinnelle Hall
University of California
Berkeley 4, California

Dear Professor Schorske:

I write to commend you for your public
service in chairing the meeting last Monday
at which Mr. Lima spoke. Your motives and your
role in doing this are bound to be misunderstood
and misinterpreted by some. I hope there are many
more of us who know and appreciate your real dedi
cation to freedom which, I am sure, motivated you
to place yourself in this position.

It is certainly a pleasure to be able to
reply, in this way, to the kind note which you
sent to us when Stiles Hall opened its doors to the
History Department Colloquium a few months ago.

Cordially,
<'

'} / . v; . -/

. -x y . ^ -.'/ i , ,

"William J. Davis

STAFF

General Sf(te:ar)

WILLIAM J. DAVI-.

Prtji'am .V/.f'

GERALD M GOODMAN

JOHN A MARTIN. IK.

^X'ARRFN H. ROHINMIN

En^ IN G. U ARRI N

Per: Tir..

EL-CINL B BON.NV

JOSEPH E. PATI

BILL SOMEHVILLE

O fat Si**

FRANCES LIN'.LH

ANDREM. C. SIMK^

I -

'*- ^ - July 31, 1963

Mr. Wlllian J. Davis
Stiles Bull
2toO Bancroft Way
Berkeley U, California

Dear Mr. Davis:

Thank you very much for you kind note.
Your prediction was right: the unfavorable
returns are coming in; but no one interested
in civil liberties can escape tliis sort of
thing. I know that you agree that the price
is pretty small considering what is at stake,
nevertheless, it is certainly cheering to
get expressions of support from people like
yourself.

Sincerely yours,

Carl E. Schorske
Chairnan

CES:mf

165

.
« *

KAKELEY: Office of the Chancellor
November 19, 1963

DEANS, DIRECTORS AND DEPARTMENT ChVHRMEN:

The Regents' In their June meeting modified the University1* policy on
off-campus speakers. Their resolution reads:

The Regents of the University of California have confidence In
the students of the University and in their judgment In properly
evaluating any and all beliefs and Ideologies that may be expressed
in University facilities by off-campus speakers. This Is in the
best American tradition.

Therefore, the Regents approved the following policy for off-campus
speakers: Any off-campus speaker may be allowed to speak on a
campus of the University in accordance with the policy set forth
In the University regulation on the "Use of University Facilities."

Whenever the respective Chancellor considers it appropriate

In furtherance of educational objectives, he may require any or

all of the following:

1. That the meeting be chaired by a tenure member of the faculty.

2. That the speaker be subject to questions from the audience.

3. That the speaker be appropriately balanced in debate with a
person of contrary opinions.

On the campuses of the University of California, when off-campus speakers
are discussing political, social or religious Issues, the meeting will
be chaired by a tenure member of the faculty, and the speaker will ee
subject to questions from the audience.

Undoubtedly there will be meny meetings on the Berkeley campus for
which faculty moderators wl 1 1 be needed. So that the burden will not
fall too heavily on a few, and to aid students In finding moderators
for their meetings, I am requesting that you furnish me, by November
25, names of those tenure members of your department or staff
you think will be willing to serve occasionally as moderators.

E. H. Strong

166

PROFESSIONAL ETHOS AND PUBLIC CRISIS:
A HISTORIAN'S REFLECTIONS*

BY CASL E. SCHOKBK*, Vwernty of California, Berkeley

«''"I~SHE professional assodation and public
Jl issues": why is the topic before us? A so
cial crisis has placed it there.

That communities so secure in their sense of
purpose and function as learned associations are
falling victim one by one to anxiety, self-doubt,
and explosive internal criticism attests in itself
to the gravity of America's condition. For ours
u an Enlightenment society, constructed on the
premise that the progress of society and the
progress of mind are interdependent. When the
society divides over the value and function of
learning, when the academy divides over its vo
cation and its social responsibility, it is safe to
conclude that a republic founded like ours on
faith in reason is not in good health.

Every province in the world of scholarship
must find its own way to meet the crisis of learn
ing in which we are all involved. I can offer little
more than reflections on the evolving relationship
of scholarship to public life. Out of the contrast
of past experience and present context, perhaps
we can see more dearly bow to sunder the useful
from the obsolete in our inheritance. Against this
background, we can then assess the relevance for
the MLA of actions by other professional organ
izations to revitalize their scholarly ethos to meet
the modern crisis.

Scholars have ever been conscious of holding
dual citizenship. They are citizens of a civil pol
ity and citizens of the republic of letters. The
two communities overlap, but they are not the
same in their purposes, their canons of behavior,
and their ultimate commitments. Traditionally,
the two republics of politics and of learning have
organized their relationship under something like
the Gelasian theory that governed Church and
State in medieval Europe. Spiritual power and
temporal power each had its proper sphere and
wielded its own sword, while each supported and
served the other in its proper function. The voice
of the republic of learning is raised in matters of
politics only when its vital interest is affected;
that is, the pursuit of troth by the use of intel
lect. The polis, for its parts, violates the immu
nity of the scholarly world only when the latter

•An addreu delivered »t the Plenary Meeting of the
MLA Standing Committee* in New York, 28 March
1968.

acts in an illegal way. Immanuel Kant, in his at
tempt to clarify the relations between scholarship
and politics, distinguished between reason in its
universal employment, and reason in its civil or
religious employment. In the first, the governing
principle was "dare to know"; in the second,
"argue as much as you want, but obey." Under
these two principles, the two republics con
fronted each other with different commitments
but could live together in uneasy mutual tolera
tion.

In the 1780's, while. Kant was articulating his
ideas of scholarly-political relations, the young
American republic was engaged in a fever of ed
ucational experiment. It was groping for means
to achieve a far closer integration of the republic
of letters and the civil republic than had ever
been attempted before. With all due allowance
for the powerful religious ingredient in the mak
ing of American civilization, our polity was con
ceived in the Enlightenment and built upon its
premises. Under the historical perspective of the
Enlightenment, the progress of society and the
progress of mind are one. While religion is re
duced to a private affair, the life of the mind is
elevated into a public concern. Enlightenment so
ciety makes the principle of scholarship— ration
ally controlled innovation — its own principle of
development For good or for fll, the distinction
between the republic of learning and the chril re
public becomes blurred as the two spheres move
toward concentricity.

The substantive content of the rational philos
ophy of the Enlightenment further reinforced
the integration of the scholarly and the civic
realms. Science— or natural philosophy — and the
study of man were conceived under a single
principle, that of immanent rationality, which the
scholar would disclose. Scientific reason and nor
mative reason collaborate to the same end ; tech
nical and moral progress proceed together, each
reinforcing the other. That is why the institution
of learning is assigned not only technical and
service functions, but also moral and metaphysi
cal functions earlier performed by the Church.
Alma mater is the American successor to Mother
Church, Mater et Afagittra. The scholar Is
looked to as moral teacher and guardian, as well
as scientist, increasing both his responsibility and
his temptation.

There were two kinds of integration In the

979

980

Projcssiond Ethos and Public Crisis: A Historian's Reflections

Enlightenment— one of the academy and society,
the other of the natural and humanistic sciences.
Though never complete, the strength of the inte
grations in America was sufficient to produce a
powerful civic tradition of claim for scholarly
service, technical and moral; and an equally
powerful scholarly tradition of claim to a role in
the definition of the public weal. The traditional
dual citizenship of the scholar seemed reduced to
a distinction without a difference. On both sides,
civil and scholarly, the guards were down.

Toward the close of the nineteenth century,
both society and scholarship took a new turn. So
ciety began to discover that not all the fruits of
scientific civilization were sweet, as the techno
logical economy revealed its social cruelty. At the
nrae time, the internal development of scholar
ship made specialization an intellectual necessity.
New forms of scholarly organization were de
vised to promote it. The scholar became a
professional. In the 1870's and 80's. 200 learned
organizations were established, changing the ori
entation of the man of learning away from the
general cultivated public to his specialized schol
arly peer group. As each discipline became orga
nized into a guild with its canons, the old En
lightenment unities broke down. The autonomis-
tk tendencies of men of learning, dormant since
the days of Kant and the early liberal struggle
for academic freedom, appeared once more. The
once unified community of learning became frag
mented into a congery of specialized provinces,
each living by its own discipline, dedicated to its
own enterprise. The primary intellectual respon
sibility of the scholar was neither to urbs nor to
orbs, neither to his local scene nor to the great
republic of letters, but to his professional peer
group — to other specialized scholars. According
ly — and this seems to me vital for our present
concern — the degree to which a scholar would
consider the social or general human import of
his work and vocation came to depend on the
peer group, on the professional ethos of the or
ganized discipline to which he was committed.
The new professional did not go back to Kant's
universalism when he revived Kant's autonomy.
As be broke from the Enlightenment unities in
the interest of substantive scholarly progress, he
slipped unwittingly into both moral and civic ir
responsibility.

Of course this was not apparent at the time
when American scholarship was first organizing
professionally. The confidence in the ulti

mate order and coherence of the universe that
pervaded liberal culture in the nineteenth century
informed the development of specialized scholar
ship as well. The nineteenth century, after til,
was full of slogans reflecting a proud autonomy
in plural standards which an era with less meta
physical optimism could hardly dare espouse:
"Business is business"— "Krieg ist Krieg"— "L*-
trt pour I'art": these maxims declare that each
field shall operate under its own law, with no ex
ternal referent, human or divine, ethical or meta
physical. Let us not forget wertfreie Wiuen>-
schaft, the scholar's version of laissti-faire, as
a late addition to this list. Or "To pursue troth
wherever it may lead." The scholar, like the boa-
nessman and the artist, still had the sense that an
inherent power for order in the world would ab
sorb his product into its beneficent economy
without his assuming responsibility for the pro
cess.

To be sure, the actual behavior of the young
professional associations shows the strength of
social impulses beneath the specialist's intellec
tual claims to autonomy. Franklin Jameson, the
spirihu rector of the young American Historical
Association, was committed to a rigorous histori
cal positivism ; but behind it lay a democratic an
imus against the patrician aristocracy of culture.
He was determined to break the power of what
he called the "elderly swells who dabble in his
tory" by creating; a "professorial class." The ed
ifice of historical knowledge could no longer be
built by single individuals privileged with great
leisure, but only by a corporate community
working according to common scientific princi
ples. Jameson set as a major aim of the AHA
"the spread of thoroughly good second-class
work," for on this both the progress of knowl
edge and the dissemination of culture depended.
History as Wisscnschaft implied the profes
sional community in reciprocal service with a
democratic polity — at the expense of the elite.1

The early transactions of the Modern Lan
guage Association reveal a similar integration of
professional, scientific commitment and public or
social concern. In 1887, when this association
was in its infancy, Provost William Pepper of
the University of Pennsylvania welcomed your
fifth conclave in Philadelphia thus: "You call
yourselves the Modern Language Association of
America . . . You represent a new and aggressive
force in education ; you are the leaders in the at-

' John Higham rt »1 , Hitlory, in Humanist* Sckoior
«fc> in Amtrie*. cd Richard SchUtter (Enjlrirood
Cliff*, N.J.. 1965). pp. 6-25.

168

Carl E. Schorske

981

tack now being made on the stronghold of the
classicists." Dr. Pepper was obviously convinced
that the MLA was doing society's work in its de
struction of "the rigid sway of an exclusive sys
tem" — classical education — "kept up for the ben-
efit of a small and exclusive class." The popula
tion explosion posed a threat then as now:
"(O]ur colleges are barely maintaining their in
fluence and hold over the swarming millions of
our population. Had not a wise heed been paid to
the changing needs of our national life and rela
tions, and to the changing aspects of our national
thought, the influence of our colleges might have
been far less than it is today." Upon this influ
ence, Dr. Pepper asserted, "the future of our
precious institutions depends." Hence be hailed
the MLA as a development which brought the
academic system "in closer touch with the intel
lectual needs of our people."1

The authors of the papers in the early issues
of PMLA suggest a similarly broad conception
of the new professional's vocation. As you
doubtless know better than I, the crusade against
the classics was not narrowly utilitarian. In jus
tifying the study of modern literature and lan
guage, its advocates pressed their social and moral
value as vigorously as their value of knowledge.
The stress on Germanic pure science was paral
leled by an evident populist zeal to analyze and
preserve local dialects, minority group languages,
and poetry which betrays that democratic love
of the folk with which Herder had informed
the German philological revolution. The scholar
and the people were connected by a two-way
street. The scholar absorbed and honored popu
lar culture, while the folk was to absorb the lan
guage and literature of the elite culture. One ar
dent advocate of the democratization of higher
learning urged the association to introduce the
teaching of Old English philology in the elemen
tary schools. "Let us convert the school-boards,"
he urged; 'let each of us become a priest and
missionary in partibus infidelium."*

Enough has been said to indicate that the new
professorial class, with all its scientific detach
ment, still defined its scholarly commitment as
largely overlapping with its public function if
not identical with it. The assumptions of the
Enlightenment still held together the republics
of learning and of politics, while expanded edu
cation assured the progress of both spheres. This
was as true for the literary profession as for the
historical and scientific ones. Though learning
was now corporate enterprise, it still implied a
civic mission.

Gradually, however, the terms of the relation
ship between the learned and the wider society
were changed. The metaphysical and moral
premises of the Enlightenment were gradually
eroded in favor of a frank instrumentalisrn or
pragmatism. The innocence of the Age of Rea
son, with its faith in universal culture, gave way
to the innocence of the Age of Expertise, with
its confident commitment to specialized research.

Social developments reinforced the internal
tendencies of scholarship toward the encapsula
tion of the higher learning in professional com
munities of experts. The transformation of our
economy by science and technology created vast
demands for scientific skills. They were called
for not only to extend the miracles of produc
tion, but also to mitigate the social disasters at
tendant upon them. While the natural scientists
developed new ties with industry, social scientists
picked up the pieces as government advisors or
civil servants. A moral impulse often underlay
the scholar's entry into these new tasks of schol
arship. Yet there was a great difference between
being a professor-social reformer of the old
school like John R. Commons and a New Deal
bureaucrat. The old progressive served the dem
ocratic society; the new one served the demo
cratic state. The "value-freedom'' prevalent in
the new professional ethic increased impercepti
bly as the scholar became a servant of industrial
or governmental bureaucracy rather than an in
dependent agent pursuing self-chosen social
goals. Because the bureaucratization of political
life and scholarly service was undertaken in the
interest of social reform and the war against
Nazi tyranny, the slow transformation of the ac
ademic intellectual into a "value-free" state ex
pert was hardly observed even by the usually
critical Left.

The whole process has now caught up with us.
The body social is deeply split over its destiny,
and the academic community over its nature and
public function. American society has employed
science as the sorcerer's apprentice did his mas
ter's magic, abetted by the scholars' zeal for
truth without consequences. The miracle of tech
nological rationality is drowning us in goods and

• "Address of Welcome," Transactions tmd Ptoettd-
mgs of Ike Ifodern Language Association of Amrricv,
m (1887). 3-6.

' Francis B Gnnanere, "What Place Hi* Old English
Philology in Our Elementary Schools?" Transactions of
Itu Modern Latgtiagt Association of America, I (1884-
85), 170-178. See alto Vols. i-m, passim

982

Professional Ethos and Public Crisis: A Historian's Reflections

exploding in computerized overkill, while our
problem of poverty becomes • problem of racial
culture Because the society is so obviously de
pendent on the educated and manned by the ex
pert, penetrated by Mind, so to speak, the social
crisis takes, for the first time, the specific form
of a crisis of Enlightenment. The two loci of our
crisis are the two traditional centers of civiliza
tion itself: the city and the institutions of learn -
inf. The two crisis strata are the ghetto Negroes
and the intelligentsia — those win the least edu
cation and those with the most. They are in re
volt against the hypertrophy of morally uncon-
tained rationality, against learning ran amok.
Small wonder that they often rebel against intel
lect itself, in a kind of mindless passion. That is
the negative reaction to the rule of passionless
mind in imperial America.

That a social crisis should come to focus in
the question of the use and abuse of learning is a
situation unprecedented in the history of learn
ing because never has knowledge been the very
stuff of power as it has become in modern Amer
ica. The rfvoltis call upon the academic commu
nity to cry out and rebel ; the right-wingers tell it
to shut up and study. The Left appeals to the
traditional moral functions in the academic
ethos, the Right to the scientific and technologi
cal-service functions. Each of these external
claimants on the academy has its partisans within
the walls, equally prepared to press the univer
sity into the service of external power.

What is to be done? In the face of society's
division, the tendency of most of the academy is
to accept the issue as it is posed, politically, and
to answer it with a reassertion of its traditional
immunity and neutrality. Kant's two republics
are invoked again, in one of which we follow
troth wherever it may lead, and in the other of
which we argue but obey. This "dual-citizenship"
solution may solve the problem for the individual
scholar and for the university administration, but
it no longer solves the problem for the profes
sional community. Why not? Because it
construes the problem falsely as scholarship ver-
MT potties.

I submit that the challenge of politics to the
community of learning today should — and does
—raise not a question of politics, though it does
that too. but of scholarly ethos. What is before
us is the consequence of the breakdown of the
Enlightenment unity of instrumental and moral
rationality; for the modern scholar, the conse
quence of the value- free science his professional
organizations were built to promote. Has the

right tu pursue truth wherever it leads a more
absolute justification than the right to pursue
free enterprise wherever it kads? If not, what
voice shall the scholar assume in preventing the
abuse of learning? If the mixed economy comes
to the organization of learning, bow can the indi
vidual scholar be protected in his pursuit of
truth? The scholarly community can determine
the answer only if it recognizes a concomitant
responsibility ; a responsibility for the implica
tions of its findings for society and mankind.
This, I believe, is the point of entry for profes
sional associations into the public sphere.

One would expect the humanists to be the first
to face the moral challenge of the social crisis of
learning. Instead the natural scientists have led
the way. The American Association for the Ad
vancement of Science (AAAS). after much de
bate, entered the arena of public issues in a man
ner directly related to the scholarly competence
of its members. In 1960, its Committee on Sci
ence in Human Welfare defined the rationak for
such engagement as follows :

[T]he scientific community should, on its own ini
tiative, assume an obligation to call public atten
tion to those issues of public policy which relate to
science, and to provide for the general public the
facts and estimates of the effects of alternative pol
icies which the citizen must have if he is to par
ticipate intelligently in the solution of these prob
lems. A citizenry thus informed is, we believe, the
chief assurance that science will be devoted to the
promotion of human welfare.4

The committee separated the role of the scientist
in political decision-making, where he is indistin
guishable from other citizens, from his role in
"science-related issues," where "the scientist and
his organizations have both a unique competence
and a special responsibility."* In pursuance of
this policy, the AAAS Council in 1966 es
tablished a Committee on the Consequences of
Environmental Alteration, with the task of ex
amining the effects of chemical and biological
agents which modify the environment. This com
mittee has, among other things, engaged the gov
ernment in a searching scientific inquiry on the
long-run effects of herbicides. Instead of the
scientist serving the government as expert bu
reaucrat, his professional community now orga
nizes to serve the citizens, against their govern-

' AAAS Committee on Science in the Promotion of
Human Welfare, "Science and Human Welfare," Sei
ner, outxn (8 July 1960). 4.

'"Science and Human Welfare," Scirnet, cxxzn, 3-4.

170

Carl E. Sckorske

983

ment if need be. The committee is insistent but
not aggressive. It "volunteers its cooperation
with public agencies and offices of government
for the task of ascertaining scientifically and ob
jectively the full implications of major programs
and activities which . . . affect the ecological bal
ance on a large scale."* The scientists here repre
sent no party but the party of humanity, at
whose disposal their professional organization
places their expertise. The controversy within
the scientific professions over this new role has
often been heated.' But that too has helped to ed
ucate the members of the profession to a broader
conception of their vocation.

The American Anthropological Association,
after acrimonious debate, adopted a resolution on
the Vietnam War in November 1966.* More im
portantly, it has been exploring the ethical ques
tions posed for the anthropologist by Ameri
ca's world policy. It is not easy for the anthro
pologist to win confidence in cultures which per
ceive Americans as a master race. At the same
time, like the natural scientists, the anthropolo
gists have been involved in government work.
Their involvement in planning for counterinsur-
gency in Project Camelot led the AAA to probe
its own ethos. Government employment, govern
ment financing of research were only the more
obvious targets of professional association in
quest. The relevant committee reported that "the
feeling is growing in all scientific fields that the
researcher should be aware of the policy implica
tions of his results, and furthermore should try
to specify their legitimate use."* The inquest re
sulted in a "Statement on Problems of Anthropo
logical Research and Ethics," adopted at the 1967
meeting. The statement begins with an identifi
cation of the anthropologist with the party of hu
manity, though for scientific reasons: "The
human condition, past and present, is the concern
of anthropologists throughout the world . . . Ex
pansion and refinement of [our] knowledge [of
mankind] depend heavily on international under
standing and cooperation in scientific and schol
arly inquiry . . . Constraint, deception and se
crecy have no place in science." Academic insti
tutions and their members, including students,
"should scrupulously avoid both involvement in
clandestine intelligence activities and the use of
the name of anthropology as a cover for intelli
gence activities."10 I doubt that those who
adopted this resolution knew that, in 1919, Franz
Boas, founding father of the AAA, was censured
and stripped of his membership in the associa
tion's council because he publicly attacked two

anthropologists who "prostituted science by
using it as a cover for their activities as spies" in
Mexico.11 Under the pressure of America's new
crisis of polity, the anthropologists seem to be
developing a less governmental and more univer
sal conception of scholarly responsibility.

The anthropologists have also turned to bring
their discipline to bear on the problem of war. A
group of 350 anthropologists, believing that
members of their guild "have both a moral and
professional concern for the effects of war on
the human species," petitioned the AAA for
symposia on this subject. The papers and discus
sion, along with some instructive history of the
controversy over science and public issues, have
been made available to the wider public under the
title, War: The Anthropology of Armed Conflict
and Aggression, edited by Morton Fried et al.
(New York, 1968). Both the political problems
and the intellectual potentialities arising out of a
confrontation of an academic discipline with the
political and moral dilemmas of the modern
world are illuminated by this record. At the next
business meeting of the AAA, it is planned to
discuss anew the war and world politics as mat
ters of practical urgency for American anthro
pologists, whose professional lives are threatened
with erosion as backward people shut out the
scientific American in recoil against the ugly
American. The experience of the AAA in ap
proaching these issues has been tension-laden
and arduous. But it demonstrates graphically
how much any discipline has to gain in self-un
derstanding when it dares to bring its light to
hear on basic public questions.

What are the common features b the ap
proach of these two organizations, the AAAS
and the AAA, to the public domain ? First, they
have moved toward assuming some corporate re
sponsibility to clarify the implications of their

* "Science and Human Welfare," Science, (XV (17 Feb.
1967), 856.

' "Science and Human Welfare," Science, cux (23 Feb.
1968), 857-859.

• Kathleen Gough, "World Revolution and the Science
of Man," in The Dissenting Academy, ed Theodore
Roszak (New York, 1967), pp. 136-137.

'American Anthropological Association Newsletter,
vm (Jan. 1967), 6.

" "Statement on Problems of Anthropological Research
and Ethics by the Fellows of the AAA."

" George W. Stocking, The Parameters of a Para-
diem: Franz Boas, the American Anthropological As
sociation and the National Research Council " (Unpub
lished MS.)

1/1

9ft4

Projesrional Ethos and Public Crisis: A Historian's Reflections

sciences for society and, conversely, the implica
tions of public policy for their sciences. Accord
ingly, the scientists' service to the state is being
placed in the wider context of a public diaconate
of scholarship. Second, the ethos of the scholarly
community is being enlarged through debate, im
pelling its members to be mindful of the general
implications of their pursuit of truth. Third, no
attempt is made by the organizations to subordi
nate scholarship to political criteria. Instead,
each scholarly community reminds itself that its
primary allegiance is and must be to the party of
humanity ; if that means debate or even conflict
with political authority, so be it. Kant's "argue
but obey" is no longer enough to save learning
from abuse. But his "dare to know" proves ap
plicable in a new contort.

You may well ask whether the precedent of
scholarly communities whose research is so
dearly involved with the public domain has any
implications for your province of learning. If lit
erature reflects and can enhance the quality of
life, then surely literary scholars, as a body, must
have a concern to make the public aware of bow
that quality is being rendered and assayed in lit
erature. Not every scholar will engage in that
task, but could not your community of scholars
explore and report to the public on the problem
of oar polluted culture — including its flowers of
evil? Just so has the AAAS tackled the problem
of oar polluted eimiuuiiieuL

A second, related area of inquiry is that of
language. We all know that the Negro is resist
ing learning "pure" English in the schools. What
do we know about his language? Why don't we
kara ft? The MLA of the 1880*s plied a two-
way street between academic and folk culture.
As a European historian, I know that every dem

ocratic movement in the nineteenth century — in
Greece, Serbia, Bohemia, and the like bad as a
decisive stage the convergence of philologist and
folk, to bridge the cultural gulf that divided elite
and people. Are your scholars and students
learning about the language gap between the
ghetto culture and ours, or between Puerto K»-
cans and Negroes? If not, perhaps the VtLA
could reactivate its earlier interest, seoshiziDg
the American citizens and urban officials to the
possibilities of a creative integration of the sci
ence of culture with society, and thus of one
stratum of society with another.

In these and other areas, the MLA would, I
think, find the ways charted by the AAAS and
the AAA the most promising. They reckon with
all the historical realities. They neither retreat
into Enlightenment optimism about the natural
beneficence of knowledge, nor do they remain
mired in the indifferentism of werlfrei* Wixten-
schaft. They begin from the realistic premise that
specialism is the modern form of knowledge, bat
that the moral detachment integral to it is dan
gerous both to learning and to life. These profes
sional corporations face the obligation arising
from this danger, and commit their resources in
learning and research to clarifying iik.«Ant
scholarly aspects of public issues. Even at politi
cal risk, they are learning to educate the public to
the social and cultural dangers they discern.
They are finding ways for the repubHc of learn
ing to contribute to the civil republic according
to its own nature end concerns, without being
swallowed by politics. In short, they show that
the general spirit of the Enlightenment can soil
govern the behavior of the modern speciafiicd
professional association in a way appropriate to
the modern crisis.

Reprinted with the permission of the
Publications of the Modern Language
Association.

172

APPENDIX G

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY DIVISION

ELECTION OF THE EMERGENCY EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE

The following persons have been nominated to serve on the Emergency
Executive Committee authorized by the Berkeley Division of the Academic
Senate at its meeting on December 8, 196U.

Nominee

D. Blackwell (Statistics)

R. L. Beloof (Speech)

R. G. Bressler, Jr. (Agricultural

Economics)

E. F. Cheit (Business Administra
tion)

K. Davis (Sociology)

S. P. Diliberto (Mathematics)

L. S. Feuer (Philosophy)

Nominators

B. Friedman (Mathematics)

G. M. Kuznets (Agricultural Economics)

F. C. Newman (Law)

H. N. Smith (English)

J. R. Whinnery (Electrical Engineering)

G. D. Berreman (Anthropology)

C. H. Sederholm (Chemistry)
S. Shifrin (Music)

P. E. Thomas (Mathematics)

G. B. Wilson (Speech; Dramatic Art)

H. A. Bern (Zoology)

V. Fuller (Agricultural Economics)

J. J. Parsons (Geography)

T. L. Reller (Education)

E. S. Rogers (Public Health)

W. Galenson (Business Administration;

Economics)
C. Landauer (Economics)

C. B. McGuire (Business Administration)
L. Ulman (Economics; Business Administra
tion)

D. Votaw (Business Administration)

D. I. Arnon (Cell Physiology)

W. Galenson (Business Administration;

Economics)

S. M. Lipset (Sociology)
C. B. McGuire (Business Administration)
M. Meyerson (Architecture)

G. J. Maslach (Mechanical Engineering)

A. E. Hutson (English)

C. W. Tobias (Chemical Engineering)

M. H. Protter (Mathematics)

A. Torres -Rioseco (Spanish & Portuguese)

C. Landauer (Economics) „

E. F. Cheit (Business Administration)
L. Ulman (Business Administration;

Economics)

W. Galenson (Business Administration;

Economics)

D. S. Shwayder (Philosophy)

173
•2-

Nominee

B» J. Moyer (Physics)

R. E. Powen (Chemistry)

A. M. Ross (Business Administra
tion)

S. A. Schaaf (Mechanical Engin
eering)

H. K. Schachraan (Molecular

Biology)

C. £. Schorske (History)

J« R. Searle (Philosophy)

P. Selznick (Sociology)

Nominators

R. A, Cockrell (Forestry)

A. M. Ross (Business Administration)

A. W, Imbrie (Music)

P. L. Morton (Electrical Engineering)

E, 04 Segre (Physics)

C« B. Morrey, Jr. (Mathematics)

L. Constance (Botany)

G. Mackinney (Nutritional Sciences)

J. R. Whinnery (Electrical Engineering)

I. M. Heyman (Law)

M. Chernin (Social Welfare)
G. J. Maslach (Mechanical Engineering)
P. Selznick (Sociology)
J» R. Searle (Philosophy)
W. M. Stanley (Biochemistry; Molecular

Biology)

R. E. Powell (Chemistry)
E. V. Lai tone (Mechanical Engineering)
G. J. Maslach (Mechanical Engineering)
J» V. Wehausen (Naval Architecture)
E. M. McMillan (Physics)

D. A. Glaser (Physics)

E. B. Haas (Political Science)
J. R. Caldwell (English)

E. R. Dempster (Genetics)
W. M. Stanley (Biochemistry; Molecular

Biology)

H. N. Smith (English)
H. Rapoport (Chemistry)
H. G. Blumer (Sociology)
S. S» Elberg (Bacteriology)
L» Constance (Botany)

H. McClosky (Political Science)

B. J. Moyer (Physics)

A. M. Ross (Business Administration)

M, Schorer (English)

S. Smale (Mathematics)

D. A. Glaser (Physics)

F. C. Newman (Law)

E. F. Cheit (Business Administration)

G. L. Turin (Electrical Engineering)
J» tenBroek (Political Science)

174

•3-

Nominee

Nominators

A. H. Sherry (Law)

R. E. Degnan (Law)
I. M. Heyman (Law)
S. Kadish (Law)
D. W. Louisen (Law)
S. Sato (Law)

S. Silver (Electrical Engineering) B. Bresler (Civil Engineering)

S. S. Elberg (Bacteriology)
L* M» Grossman (Nuclear Engineering)
0. J, Maslach (Mechanical Engineering)
B. J. Moyer (Physics)

J. Tussman (Philosophy)

W. R. Dennes (Philosophy)

R. I. Smith (Zoology)

D. Rynin (Philosophy)

R. Y» Stanier (Bacteriology)

N. Jacobson (Political Science)

T. Vermeulen (Chemical Engineering) W. H. Giedt (Mechanical Engineering)

W, Balamuth (Zoology)
L» L« Sammet (Agricultural Economics)
R. N. Walpole (French)
D. W. Jorgenson (Economics)

R. C. Williams (Molecular
Biology)

B. Mates (Philosophy)

J. A. Garbarino (Business Administration)

J. D. Hart (English

P. L. Morton (Electrical Engineering)

E. 0. Segre (Physics)

APPENDIX H
17$

Department of History
Dcceasber 6, 1965

Proposal for History Faculty and
Grmduate-Student Fsllovs* Group in Ict«ll«ctual History

I. The Substantive Expansion of the History of Higher Culture.

Intellectual history is a comparatively nev field deriving impetus from
tvo sources: (l) The inherent , imperialistic propensity of history aa
a discipline to colligate ever more disparate elements of human cultural
behavior under the ordinance of time; and (2) the diminishing relevance
of a historical orientation to the progress of meat non-historical
disciplines. The second of these has, in the last tvo decades, placed
upon historians a burden gravely taxing their capacity in fulfilling
their role, both as scholars and as teachers. We need nev kinds of
training to met nev tasks.

The breakdown of continuity in tradition which developed in the arta in
Trance about a century ago has now spread to almost all scholarly fields.
Thus the history of philosophy which, in our student years, provided the
central axis of a philosopher's training, has been crowded to the
periphery of the discipline as the analytic and linguistic concerns
acquire predominance — concerns for which but a fev adumbrations in the
work of past philosophers have any significance. Yet the philosophic
systems of the past havo the greatest relevance to an understanding of
the development of our culture and its values. Intellectual historians
have become residuary legatees of philosophy departments as these lose
their interest ic the sequential devclopnent of their discipline.

In the field of economics, the situation is roughly similar. The history
of econoaic doctrine, vhich used to be the crowning course in the under
graduate curriculum and provided the smrran of the professional economist's
erudition, has fallen so deep into desuetude and genuine irrelevance
that economics departments find difficulty In manning the field. Again
history as a discipline is becoming the residuary legatee.

Literary scholarship underwent a siailar de -hi stori citation under the
impact of the Nev Criticise, but here a healthy relntegration of the
historical approach (at a far higher level then before) with formal
analysis has overcome the difficulty. In the history of science, a
similar reectablishment of historical and scientific-analytic synthesis
has revltallted a field. Economic history (as opposed to the history of
economic thought) has similarly experienced a methodological resurrection
after a period of lejaentable consignment to the too-narrow confines of
either history or economics departments.

Besides the fields nov undergoing de-historiclzation or Just emerging
from it, there is still a third group vhich has never been historical
and is reaching the age vhere its ovn past becomes a matter of concern
to it. There has been recently established an Association for the History
of the Behavioral Sciences, anthropologists, psychologists and sociologists

176 Page 2

have become increasingly aware (whether in healthy maturation or patho
logical necrophilia) of the significance of the work of their intel
lectual progenitors. The history of education, social work and other
professional fields has likewise drawn increasing attention.

In all these groups of disciplines -- the de-historicized, the re-
historicized and the newly historicizing -- the demand for competent
scholars is mounting. Neither history departments nor the subject-
matter departments can adequately train scholars in these hyphenated
fields without a cooperative effort.

II. The Problem of Training in the History of Thought and Culture.

A. Existing precedents and programs. Training in the history of
science has been the first to be devised to meet the problem which, as
indicated above, is growing more widespread: to train a scholar both
in the analytic skills of a given subject and in the synthetic and
contextual method of the historian. At Berkeley the History of Science
Program has become confined to the history department -- perhaps a bit
too narrowly. In Economic History, both departments concerned have
recognized that the subject may fruitfully be approached from either
discipline, but that intensive graduate training in the other is basic
to proficiency in the subject. While degrees are granted either in
Economics or in History, the requirements of both departments are
tempered to the interdisciplinary intellectual needs of the economic
historian. Courses are cross-listed and faculty collaboration eminently
successful. Unlike the sterile narrative-statistical approach traditional
to economic history, the emergent practitioners of the field are sensi
tized both to the cultural psychology of economic behavior (from history)
and the theoretical foundations of economic profess (from economics).

A third, not quite comparable area of successful interdisciplinary
graduate education at Berkeley is in the Japanese area program. Here
again, only regular departments offer degrees. But anyone who has
sat in a doctoral examination of a Japanese specialist cannot fail to
be impressed with the extraordinary range of the candidate's method
ological equipment. This is but a reflection of the lively inter
disciplinary learning which the Japanese scholars here have imparted to
each other, and which is reflected in the kinds of questions which
examiners pose to a candidate, whatever his departmental base.

B. The need for expansion of interdisciplinary graduate training. It
is surprising that, despite the acute need for what one might call
hyphenated history programs (e.g., history-philosophy, history-economic
thought, history-architecture, etc.), so few interdisciplinary programs
have been devised. Precisely because the demands here are for regular
training in the auxiliary discipline, the difficulty of devising such
programs is minimal. Special interdisciplinary courses are not only
necessary but perhaps even pedagogical ly undesirable. The need can be
but satisfied by utilizing existing graduate seminars in two different
disciplines. An intellectual historian who wishes to work in philosophy
should be schooled in philosophical analysis of precisely the same

ri«orooji kiwi vith which the bidding philosopher !• equipped. 80 tec

the student of llt«r«tur« who vi«h«a to develop the historical diaen- .,

•ion of bis discipline should r*c*lrt •«K±n»r trainiag in the hi«torl*a'»

craft, quit* apart from literary subject Matter.

IB abort, the •nbetantive need of •«hoi*r« for solid interdisciplinary i

»« suggest that v* introduce a far gr*«t«r fl.xiblllty in

training, ttie can b* don* vlthottt *«ttifi< vp n»v

littl* cr««tiT« lat«r-dep«rtBnt«l planning on to* lin«§
y th« •OOBOVie histoa-iaas «n<5 th« J«p*n«»« are*

lu 00*1 Vaartiiri in tb« fl«lfl , tlwr* is an aeut* MBSB of
In tte «l«ofa*rg« of a Mrlon duty. X«t tb* inUUoetoal historian ia
Vidftly «Ad oartfttlOy »quipp«d in tas n«ld of Btn«r»i history. If his
to a* ajora thoroughly sehoolad in a Mo-blatoriaal

baft vbaU to* loas of oanaral cndition in history
ba af»iBimlil fort

X sifgBSt that, in tba hrpbanatad prograjai grmdaat* studants, at laast
to mlstorjr, ba aakad to dairalop fMiillarity with tvo bistorioal fialds.
•o thai tba eoaWxtoal ssnsibilltlas b« strwgthMMd by aosparati«a
aaaSymia. 4hns a stwdant in history and philosophy Might offar a field
in ITtt oaaUuy Tranoa and 19th eantxory Oarsjany, and ba aakad to Aanon>
atrcka bis oonnnnd of tha gnaral history and philosophy of both enlturas
in Ua qpalifylnc ITMH, vith spacial attantion to tha problaBa of
Mdaistlajrttiift tha aooial-fonetionsl dinensioo of philoaophy in the
two wiHacr. Qraa tba stadant would acquire breadth by analytic eonpari-
aon wtwr* a nora holistic approaefa would earry the danger of producing
superficiality . Us erudition in a given traditional discipline would
ba lee a than at present, but his enaamrd of skills to pursue new knov-
voald ba alaarly greater.

XXX. Tsoliaattone for general Mueetiop.

A. A national need. Aside from the felt aeholarly need for the hyphen-
•JtaA ajtiproach to adranoed laaming in the history of thought and higher
emlture , tbara exists a strong demand for teachers able and equipped to

intardiaeiplinary instruction. Introductory courses in tha
I ties and integrated social sciences present their sponsors vith

staffing problems. We confront today a strange aituation in
vteicfa the frontiers of scholarship snd the frontiers of college inetruc-
tioa both danand nore rlgoroua and rich interdisciplinary eapacitiea,
vhile graduate edaeation prorldes only that degree of breadth vhieb a
aingla dlaaipllne offers. Man trained in history and philoaophy, sociology
and litaaraturet anthropology end political science could sake a far nore
oraatiw* response to tba national desands for genaral education ia the
huMnitiea and aoeisl seieoces. In their teaching as ia their aobolar-
ahip, ajajeb Ban vill be problea centered, not dieeipline or •etbod

B. A >er>algT need: Lover dirisioc general education. The ilsrsl npaent

178

of • general education prograa at Berkeley Bust surely suffer froc the
fact th«t the t*Aching assistsntships are alaost all organised oo disci
plinary line*. The narrowness of the organisation (if not the «ubrt*nc«)
of graduate instruction find* natural reflection in tbe departaentalisin
of lovar division prograas. If graduate training were conceived on the
line* suggested above, it would liberate nev energy for interdisciplinary
undergraduate instruction. Moreover, it vould aake highly deeirable
for the graduate student a teaching internahip of an interdiicipllnary
character. Ixpanded general education of the undergraduate would enrich
tbe interdisciplinary equipment end general eultiTatlon of the teacher.
Participation in general education courses, which presently is often
viewed a* a sacrifice, would, if it grev oat of a new conception of
graduate training, becone an intellectual advantage.

is no need for the general education courses to be tailored closely
to the interdisciplinary progrea of the graduate student. Indeed, the
graduate prograa should develop analytic capacity in two disciplines
only and (at least for historians) faailiarlty with two national cultures.
'There aust be the greatest latitude in determining which coabinations
of skills are best for the students — not tight requirements. Breadth

later; it can no longer be taught synoptlcally. Teaching in
education courses, however, can provide the dimension of breadth
to graduate education. In short, where the graduate training will eon-
centrate nore on developing skills and less on erudition, the teaching
experience will provide broad cultivation and a corpus of material in
which the graduate student asy apply his newly analytic acquired equipment.

A few general education courses for freshmen and sophomores In each major
cluster of fields — Humanities and Social Sciences — might be staffed
by students froa the interdisciplinary graduate training programs. These
would bring together, as the integrated Social Science course presently
does, graduate students from several fields, who learn as auch from each
other as they learn from their professors. Resources presently absorbed
in a multitude of departmental introductory courses could be redeployed
into a ssallsi number of interdisciplinary field courses. Certainly
history, English and philosophy should be able to devise one or two
joint courses wherein a community of discourse and some academic skills
could be Jointly conveyed to the lower division student.

If. A Graduate Program in History and Culture.

Out of the needs for nev forms of training to aeet the scholarly problems
of the history of higher culture, Berkeley can develop a graduate pro
gram in which teaching experience will be integral to the education of
the graduate. In turn, the existence of a capable corps of graduate
students with interdisciplinary interests and skills should contribute
to the effective development of a lower division general education program.

The graduate program could be conceived on a five-year basis, as follows:

179

1st year: Fully supported year of study; Research seminars in

tvo disciplines, plus Faculty group seminar. M. A. oral.

2nd year: Fully supported year of study: ' Research seminars in
tvo disciplines.

3rd year: Teaching internship; take qualifying exam on pattern
of Xoonosdc History or History of Science; i.e., with
strong interdisciplinary emphasis.

*th year: Teaching internship (cent.); begin dissertation.

9th year: Fully supported year of study; complete Ph.D. dissertation.

The program should be conceived as for Ph.D. candidates only. There
seems no vsy to offer a meaningful M.A. vhen tvo disciplines must be
mastered. The conceptual and cultural breadth will derive rather fron
teaching than from formal graduate course work. The student should con
centrate on acquiring analytic skills in seminars, but be left free of
other course requirements.

be fellowship holders admitted on a flYe— year basis,
though of course subject to dismissal for n on -performance at any stage.
This implies that the University prorlde at least Wo years of support,
justified by teaching in general education. Funds should be sought
for the first, second snd fifth years.

An imposing list of contributors to a program in History and Culture
should attract excellent students. In the better liberal arts colleges,
vhere interdisciplinary approaches to humane letters and the social
sciences are strongly .developed, may of the ablest students hesitate
to coasdt themselves to a single discipline in graduate school, but
would be drawn to richer but no less rigorous program.

Second, the status of comparative studies on the campus is now estab
lished in the Institute of International Studies. For intellectual
historians in particular, the coaparatiTe approach is invaluable, and
ve should extend into the area of the humanities the foundations
already laid by Professors Lipset and Apter in the social sciences.

If ve preserve flexibility in programming and assure a continuous
substantive scholarly basis for both the graduate program and the general
education courses sustained by it, ve can greatly strengthen our at
tractiveness to both the ablest and most sensitive graduate students
sad to the foundations needed to support them adequately. A program in
History and Culture properly devised has the singular advantage of
integrating the teaching and learning experience for the graduate
student, and unifying range and rigor in fields too prone to oscillate
vildly betveen arid specialism and windy superficiality. It would also
develop the scholarly basis for supporting a meaningful general education
program, thus integrating learning at all levels from faculty to freshmen.

180

T. The Trans-national 'Group* la Historical Studies

Of tht history faculty who would wish to associate themselves
with th« program would constitute a group 'to choose the graduate fellovi
advise tb«* CD their plans of study, and administer their examinations .
Funds should ba sought for student fallcnrahip support (first, second,
•Ad fifth FMra, T.a.) «n« for a faculty group avalnar, to be Joined by
the flrat-xaar fellowa, sjaatlnc tvlce a aontb for dinner and the evenin,
Ttie ttsilntr would oonearn itself with diceuaaion of historical works
(work in progress and published work by the sjeabers and other historian:
past and present) which ralae problem about the nature of intellectual
blsjtorj and it* relation to other disciplines and to history in the lar<
Both the dinner and the literature to be diaeussed at each session
ba provided for each assjbsr out of the aesdnar's funds. These funds
wcwild not be^ij«d for_r«]ji4se4 Jtiae- fron teaching. -

lha croup prograH in iatelleetual history might well be Hatched by
history group* with other aTanuas of approach. The possibilities of
•attracting excellent students and enriching their intellectual lives
ours are sjany and Tsrlous. This proposal aay be only a beginning.

SCHORSKE

181

Office:

Born:
Married:
Children :
Education :

CARL B. SCHORSKE

Curriculum Vitae
2000

Department of History
129 Dickinson Hall
Princeton University

New York, N.Y.
15 March 1915

Elizabeth Rorke
14 June 1941

Carl Theodore, 1942; Anne,
John, 1952; Richard, 1960

Home: 106 Winant Drive
Princeton, NJ 08540
(609) 921-3713
FAX: (609) 258-5326

Social Security:

046-26-8490

1945; Stephen, 1948;

Columbia College, A.B., 1936

Harvard University, M.A., 1937; Ph.D., 1950

National Service: Office of Strategic Services, 1941-1946 (of which three
years as Ensign/Lit. J.G., U.S.N.R.)

ACADEMIC POSTS:

Wesleyan University: Assistant Professor of History

Associate Professor

Professor
University of California, Berkeley: Professor

Chancellor's Assistant for

Educational Planning

Dayton-Stockton Professor of History

Director, Program in European
Cultural Studies

Emeritus

Visiting Lecturer

Princeton University:

Harvard University:
Yale University:

Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales:

Directeur d1 Etudes associe
College de France : Visiting Lecturer

1946-50
1950-55
1955-60
1960-69

1965-66
1969-80

1973-79

1980-present

1952

1953

1980, 1984
1986

EXTRA-UNIVERSITY POSTS, EXHIBITION CONSULTANTSHIPS z

Council on Foreign Relations, Secretary, German Study Group, 1946-48
Rockefeller Foundation, field project on revival of German academic life, 1950

Museum of Modern Art, Historical Consultant on Vienna, 1980-81

Centre Pompidou, Paris, Scientific Advisor for Vienna Exhibition, 1985-86

Metropolitan Museum of Art, Consultant for American Aestheticism Show, 1985-86;

Consultant for Herter Brothers Show, 1995
Library of Congress, Consultant for Sigmund Freud exhibition, 1997-98

SCHORSKE 182

BOARDS, ADVISORY COUNCILS, PROFESSIONAL OFFICES:

Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies, Board of Trustees, 1977-85
Institute for the Humanities, New York University, Board of Advisors, 1977-79;

Executive Committee, 1986-89

School of Architecture, Miami University, Board of Advisors, 1985-89
Institute of French Studies, New York University, Board of Advisors, 1983-

present

New School for Social Research, Enabling Committee, 1980-83
Library of Congress, Council of Scholars, 1980-1994
American Council of Learned Societies, 1981-84; Chairman, Executive Committee,

1982-84

Smithsonian Institution, Advisory Council, 1980-89
Getty Center for Art History and the Humanities, Visiting Committee, 1990-

present

Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona, Advisory Committee, 1992 -present
Stanford Humanities Center, Advisory Board, 1993-1998
Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaf ten (Vienna) , Chairman,

International Advisory Council, 1993-present
American Historial Association Council, 1964-68

Chairman, Conference Group for Central European History, 1968-69
Chairman, Modern European History Group, American Historical Association,

1979-80

EDITORIAL BOARDS:

Wesleyan University Press, 1950-59

Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1971-82

Central European History, 1972-76

Princeton University Press, 1973-77

Daedalus, 1977-90

Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought, 1979-present

History and Memory, 1989-present

Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 1991-present

AWARDS, PRIZES, DECORATIONS:

Distinguished Scholar Award, American Historial Association, 1992

Behrman Award in the Humanities, Princeton, 1980

MacArthur Prize Fellowship Award, 1981

Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, 1981

Cross of Honor for Arts and Sciences, First Class, Austrian Federal Republic,

1979

Grand Prize of the City of Vienna for Cultural Education, 1985
Ordre des arts et des lettres, off icier, French Republic, 1987
[Festschrift] Rediscovering History: Culture. Politics, and the Psyche, edited

by Michael Roth, Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif, 1994
Great Silver Medal of Honor for Service to the Austrian Republic, 1996
Harvard Centennial Medal, 1999

HONORARY DEGREES:

Wesleyan University, Dr. of Letters, 1967

Bard College, Dr. of Letters, 1982

Clark University, Dr. of Letters, 1983

New School for Social Research, Dr. of Letters, 1986

University of Salzburg, D.phil., 1986

Miami University, Dr. of Letters, 1987

State University of New York, Stony Brook, Dr. of Letters, 1989

Monmouth College, New Jersey, Dr. of Letters, 1994

University of Graz, D.phil., 1996

Princeton University, Dr. of Humane Letters, 1997

SCHORSKE 183

ELECTIVE ACADEMIES:

American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Austrian Academy of Sciences (corresponding member)

Royal Academy of Fine Arts, The Netherlands (honorary fellow)

INSTITUTE FELLOWSHIPS:

Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton) , Center for Advanced Study in the
Behavioral Sciences, Wesleyan Center for the Humanities, New York Institute for
the Humanities, Getty Center for Art History and the Humanities

FOUNDATION FELLOWSHIPS:

Guggenheim, Social Science Research Council, Rockefeller, A.C.L.S., Japan
Foundation, MacArthur Foundation

PUBLICATIONS:

A. Books

(with Hoyt Price) The Problem of Germany, Council of Foreign
Relations, Harpers, N.Y., 1947.

German Social Democracy, 1905-1917, Harvard University Press, Cambridge,

Mass., 1955; Russell and Russell reprint, N.Y., 1971, 1976; Paper
editions: John Wiley and Sons, 1966; Harper Torchbooks, 1972; Harvard
paperback, 1983; German translation, Die Grosse Spaltung, Berlin, Olle
and Wolters, 1981.

Editor (with Elizabeth Schorske) , W. L. Langer, Explorations in Crisis,
Harvard University Press, 1969.

Fin-de-siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture, Alfred A. Knopf, N.Y.,
1980; Paper edition, Vintage, 1981; translations in Italian, Spanish,
Dutch, Portuguese, German, French, Japanese, Hungarian, Rumanian; (in

preparation: Czech, Russian, and Korean).

Editor (with Thomas Bender) , Budapest and New York. Studies in

Metropolitan Transformation, 1870-1930, Russell Sage Foundation, N.Y.,
1994 .

Eine osterreichische Identitat: Gustav Mahler. Picus Verlag, Vienna,
1996

Editor (with Thomas Bender) , American Academic Culture in Transformation:
Fifty Years, Four Disciplines. Princeton University Press, Princeton,
1998

Thinking with History: Explorations in the Passage to Modernism.
Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1998; paper edition, 1999.
(Translations in preparation: French, Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew,
Hungarian, and Japanese.)

SCHORSKE 184

B. Articles; Chapters in Books

1 . International and Political History

"Eastern and Western Orientation in German Foreign Policy, " Virginia
Quarterly Review (Winter, 1947) .

"Two German Ambassadors: Dirksen and Schulenburg, " in Gordon Craig and
Felix Gilbert, eds . , The Diplomats (Princeton, 1953), pp. 477-511.

(with Franklin Ford) "The Voice in the Wilderness: Robert Coulondre, "
ibid. . pp. 555-578.

"A New Look at the Nazi Movement," World Politics. IX, No. 1 (Oct.
1956) , pp. 88-97.

2 . Cultural and Intellectual History

'"The Idea of the City in European Thought: Voltaire to Spengler, " in
Handlin and Burchard, eds., The Historian and the City (Cambridge,
Mass. , 1963) , pp. 95-114.

"Die Geburt des Moeglichkeitsmenschen, " in Special Supplement on
Sarajevo, Die Presse (Vienna, June 1964).

'"The Quest for the Grail: Wagner and Morris," in Kurt Wolff and
Barrington Moore, Jr., eds., The Critical Spirit, Essays in Honor of
Herbert Marcuse (Boston, 1967), pp. 216-232.

"Professional Ethos and Public Crisis," P.M.L.A. , LXXXIII (1968), pp.
979-984 .

"Weimar and the Intellectuals," New York Review of Books. XIV, Nos . 9
and 10, May 7, 21, 1971.

"'Ver Sacrum1 im Wien der Jahrhundertwende, " Die Presse. July 1, 1973.

"Observations on Style and Society in the Arts and Crafts Movement,"
Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University, XXXIV/2 (1975) .

"Cultural Hothouse," New York Review of Books. Dec. 11, 1975.

'"Generational Tension and Cultural Change. Reflections on the Case of

Vienna," Daedalus, Fall 1978, pp. 111-122. (French translation in
Actes de la recherche en science socialies, April 1979) .

"Freud: The Psycho-archeology of Civilizations," Mass. Hist. Society
Proceedings, XCII (1980), pp. 52-67.

"Mahler and Klimt: Social Experience and Artistic Evolution," Daedalus,
Summer 1982, pp. 29-50.

"Otto Wagner," Macmillan Encyclopedia of Architects. 1982, pp. 357-361.
"Forward," Kandinskv in Munich. Guggenheim Museum, N.Y., 1982.

Included in Thinking with History (1998).

SCHORSKE 185

"Mahler et Ives : archaisme populiste et innovation musicale," in
Collogue Internationale Gustave Mahler. 1985, (Paris, 1986), pp. 87-
97.

'"Oesterreichs asthetische Kultur, 1870-1914. Betrachtungen eines
Historikers, " in Traum und Wirklichkeit Wien 1870-1930 (exhibition
catalog, Vienna, 1985), pp. 12-25. (English: "Grace and the Word:
Austria's Two Cultures and their Modern Fate," Austrian History
Yearbook. XXII (1991), pp. 21-34.)

'"Abschied von der 6f fentlichkeit . Kulturkritik und Modernismus in der
Wiener Architektur, " in Ornament und Askese, Alfred Pfabigan, ed.

(Vienna, Verlag Christian Brandstatter, 1985), pp. 47-56.

(Translations: "De la scene publique a 1'espace priv6," in Vienna
1680-1938 [exhibition catalog] [Mus6e de 1 ' art moderne, Paris, 1986],
pp. 72-81; "Revolt in Vienna," New York Review of Books, May 29, 1986,
pp. 24-29); "Revolta in Viena, " Saber (Barcelona), no. 11, Tardor,
1986, pp. 47-53.)

"Vienna 1900. An exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art," New York
Review of Books. Sept. 25, 1986, pp. 19-24.

'"A Life of Learning," American Council of Learned Societies, Occasional
Papers , No. 1, New York, 1987. Also in The Life of Learning, Douglas
Greenberg and Stanley A. Katz, editors, New York and Oxford, 1994, pp.
53-70. Abridged version in Lary May, editor, Recasting America. Culture
and Politics in the Age of Cold War, Chicago, 1989, pp. 93-103.

"Wagner and Germany's Cultures in the Nineteenth Century," Solomon Wank
et al . , editors, The Mirror of History. Essays in Honor of Fritz
Fellner , Santa Barbara and Oxford, 1988, pp. 171-180.

'"Science as Vocation in Burckhardt ' s Basel," Thomas Bender, editor, The
University and the City, New York/Oxford, 1988, pp. 198-209.

'"History and the Study of Culture," New Literary History, vol. 21,
1989/1990, pp. 407-420.

'"Medieval Revival and its Modern Content: Coleridge, Pugin and
Disraeli," Ferenc Glatz, editor. Modern Age -- Modern Historian: In
Memoriam Gyorgy Ranki , Budapest, 1990, pp. 179-192.

"The Refugee Scholar as Intellectual Educator: a Student's
Recollection," Hartmut Lehmann and James J. Sheehan, editors, An
Interrupted Past. German-Speaking Refugee Historians in the United
States after 1933, Washington/Cambridge, 1991.

"Gustav Mahler: Formation and Transformation," Leo Baeck Memorial
Lectures, No. 35, New York, 1991.

Included in Thinking with History (1998) .

SCHORSKE 186

'"Museum im umkampften Raum, " in Wolfgang Hardtwig and Harm-Hinrich
Brandt, editors, Deutschlands Weg in die Moderne, Munich, 1993, pp. 223-
242.

'"Freud's Egyptian Dig," New York Review of Books. May 27, 1993.
(Translation: Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 95, Dec.
1992.)

"Introduction," Geneva. Zurich, Basel: History, Culture and National
Identity. Princeton University Press, 1994.

"The Panovsky Conference: A Window on Academic Culture in the
Humanities," in Irving Lavin, editor, Meaning of the Liberal Arts: Views
from Outside, Princeton, N.J., 1995, pp. 373-383.

"Pierre Bourdieu face au probleme de 1 'autonomie, " Critique, Aug. -Sept.,
1995.

"The New Rigorism in the Human Sciences, 1940-1960," American Academic
Culture in Transformation, Daedalus, Vol. 126, No. 1, 1997, pp. 289-309.

" Begegnungen mit Herbert Marcuse" in Oskar Negt, ed. Keine kritische
Theorie ohne Amerika, (Hannoversche Schriften 1) , 1999, pp. 122-131.

Included in Thinking with History (1996) .

INDEX--Carl Schorske

187

Abosh, David, 69

academic freedom, 29-33. See

also loyalty oath, University

of California; Aptheker,

Herbert; civil liberties
affirmative action, 127
African-American studies, 104
American Academic Culture in

Transformation. Fifty Years.

Four Disciplines (1997), 23
American Academy of Arts and

Sciences, 20
American Civil Liberties Union

(ACLU), 18
American Historical Association,

3, 12, 74; Willie Lee Rose

Committee, 72

Angress, Werner, 62-63, 69-70
anthropology, history of, 59-61;

anti-Catholicism, 6-7, 76-78
anticomraunism, 1-2, 86, 128-130
anti-Semitism, 3, 6, 7, 69, 75.

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